
Class. 
Book.. 



\ ' V 



Copyright^ . 



copyright DEPosm 



YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 



YOUTH AND THE 
OPEN DOOR 

THE RELATION OF HABIT AND 
CHARACTER TO SUCCESS 

BY 

GEORGE ROSS WELLS 

PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY, SCHOOL OF RELIGIOUS PEDAGOGY, 
THE HARTFORD SEMINARY FOUNDATION 




NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

681 FIFTH AVENUE 



Copyright, 1922, 
By E. P. Dutton & Company 



All Rights Reserved 



W4- 



FEINTED IN THE UNITED 
STATES OF AMEBICA 



SEP ~6 ^922. 
©CI.A681627 



IN APPRECIATION OF AID, ENCOURAGEMENT AND ACTIVE 
SYMPATHY, WITHOUT WHICH THE VOLUME COULD 
NOT HAVE BEEN PRODUCED, THIS BOOK IS 
DEDICATED TO MY WIFE 

MILDRED SAYLES MEADER WELLS 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/youthopendoorrelOOwell 



PREFACE 

Tlie following pages were originally penned 
in the form of lectures to be delivered to the 
freshmen of Ohio Wesleyan University, as a 
part of a course known as Freshman Funda- 
mentals. The purpose of this course was to 
serve as a general introduction to the various 
subjects of study and to discuss the ways and 
means whereby the budding student could hope 
to obtain as much benefit as possible from the 
four years of college on which he, or she, was 
just entering. Certain considerations made it 
seem possible that the lectures could be re-writ- 
ten so as to be of service to a wider group than 
that comprised in the college class. The lec- 
tures have, therefore, been thoroughly revised 
and much new material has been added. "While 
doing so, the author has kept in mind the needs 
and interests of the different group of auditors, 
or rather readers, to which it is now offered. 

The author gratefully acknowledges aid re- 
vii 



viii PREFACE 

ceived from so large a number of writers on 
Psychology and cognate subjects that specific 
reference is quite impossible. But particular 
acknowledgment must be made to President 
John W. Hoffman, to Dr. William Of. Hormell, 
Dean of Men, and to Mrs. G. H. Geyer, Asso- 
ciate Dean of Women, of Ohio Wesleyan Uni- 
versity. To these three the author owes sincere 
thanks, for without their aid the lectures which 
form the foundation of this volume could not 
have been delivered. 



CONTENTS 



I. Instinct 

II. Habit 

III. Habits op Study .... 

IV. Remembering and Forgetting 
V. Attention and Interest 

VI. How We Reason .... 

VII. The Effects of Emotion . 

VIII. The Causes of Failure . 

IX. The Choice of a Vocation . 

X. Character and Temperament 



1 

28 

49 

63 

90 

105 

118 

128 

1r>Q 

160 



YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 



YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

CHAPTEE ONE 

INSTINCT 

THE most amazing thing about people is 
that they are so different. When one 
stands upon the corner of two streets in a great 
city, for instance, at Broadway and Forty- 
second Street, and watches the throngs of people 
hurrying by, there is one impression that is al- 
most certain to occur and bound to persist. 
People are so very different ! They possess fea- 
tures in common, two eyes, two ears, a nose, a 
mouth and a chin, but these are so combined as 
to produce innumerable effects. One might sup- 
pose offhand that two people might be found 
now and then who would look exactly alike, but 
how often do two people really resemble each 
other strongly enough to call for remark? Men 
neither look alike, nor talk alike. Far less do 

l 



2 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

they think alike. Their tastes, their loves, their 
hatreds, their hopes, their fears, their ambitions 
are amazingly different. And though these dif- 
ferences are omnipresent they continually sur- 
prise us. It is always an incomprehensible thing 
that that which we love, others hate. One of the 
writer's small children dislikes ice-cream, and 
in the minds of her brother and sister this dis- 
like is incomprehensible. They would probably 
worry about it a good deal, did not her absti- 
nence in this matter occasionally work to their 
advantage. Throughout all the world of men, 
young and old, the fact of difference is salient, 
difference both in appearance and in ideas. To 
the student of human affairs in general, perhaps 
to the psychologist in particular, the factors 
which make for the differences among men are 
more important than those which produce our 
common resemblances. Not only are they more 
important but they are more difficult to deter- 
mine and to describe. 

Speaking generally, there are two classes of 
factors which by their co-operation determine 
that men shall be different in most things, alike 
in very few. To give these factors their com- 



INSTINCT 3 

mon names, they may be named " heredity" and 
"experience." By heredity we mean the fact 
that the organisms with which we start life are 
individually different. By the fact of experi- 
ence we mean, of conrse speaking very briefly, 
that the circumstances in life amid which we 
stand or have stood make definite and lasting 
impressions upon our organisms in general, and 
upon our nervous systems in particular. 

The two statements just made require elabo- 
ration. The matter of heredity is to a very large 
extent the matter of instinct. The effect of 
experience is what is ordinarily termed habit. 
This introductory chapter is concerned with in- 
stinct. A succeeding chapter shall' be devoted 
to a discussion of habit. 

It is only in a political sense that men are 
born equal. Men are not born equal — precisely 
the opposite is true. The race of life is a handi- 
cap. Men start with all sorts and degrees of 
advantage or disadvantage. Some men in a 
sense "beat the gun," others are left hopelessly 
outdistanced at the very start, as it*were, left at 
the post and with no possibility of ever catch- 
ing up. 



4 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

It must never be forgotten that men's possi- 
bilities are limited not only by their environ- 
ment, but also by their nervous, mental and 
physical equipment. One cannot perform im- 
possibilities. One cannot escape the limitations 
of his particular neuro-muscular machine. The 
great athlete must have the necessary muscle 
and bone, or at least a certain minimum of it. 
The singer must have the vocal cords of correct 
length, and the resonating surfaces of the throat 
and pharynx must be so curved as to pick out 
and emphasize those tones which are most pleas- 
ing to the ear. Lacking this physiological equip- 
ment Caruso would have been mute. This is not 
to say that nothing more is necessary. While 
Caruso received as a prenatal gift a superb 
mechanism for the production of music, it re- 
quired intense patience, much learning and 
countless hours of labor, for him to attain to the 
unique position he held in the world of music. 
It may be that in some quiet nook or corner of the 
world there lives another man with equally per- 
fect organs for producing sound, but if so the 
world does not know him because these organs 
have not been trained. Training is essential, but 



INSTINCT 5 

no less essential is it that the original mechanism 
be fitted for the task at which the man is to 
labor. And that task will be chosen partly by 
the circumstances governing the life of the man, 
partly by the nature of the neuro-muscular 
mechanism which he possesses. 

Most of us can never hope to sing like Caruso, 
to be surgeons like Carrel, to be ball-players 
like Ty Cobb. The fact is, simply, that we have 
not the particular gift of perfect mechanism 
which gives to these artists pre-eminence, which 
goes so far toward making them the virtuosos 
which they are. There are many singers who 
have worked hard and faithfully and have at- 
tained no success at all. The bush leagues are 
full of men who practice day in and day out, but 
who will never get into the major leagues. They 
have not the requisite mechanism of wind and 
limb and nervous system. At every graduate 
school there are men who have been students in 
their chosen subjects for many years, have per- 
haps earned high degrees by patience and toil, 
but whose acquaintances all know that some 
spark, some vital force, some ability is lacking, 
and that despite all the labor they may expend 



6 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

they will never become eminent in their fields of 
learning. There are internes in every great hos- 
pital, who spend long periods of time, perhaps 
years, assisting great surgeons in their opera- 
tions, handing them their scalpels or haemostats, 
and perhaps administering anaesthetics, but 
who will never become great surgeons them- 
selves. Let them dream and labor ever so much, 
they may never become even passable operators. 
In the cases of all these aspirants nature has 
simply not bestowed the apparatus for extreme- 
ly accurate and detailed manual action, nor for 
cool thought in moments of stress and emer- 
gency. On the other hand the expert has been 
born with just that kind of apparatus. 

To repeat, the race of life is evidently a handi- 
cap. Men do not all get an equal start. Go into 
the baby ward of a large hospital and look at 
the week's crop of babies. See them lying two 
or three in a bed with numbered tags to identify 
them. They look very much alike to the average 
visitor. The visitor, at least if he be a man, 
feels relieved that they have been carefully num- 
bered, otherwise they must certainly become 
mixed, no matter what the average man's wife 



INSTINCT 7 

may say about the ease with which they can be 
distinguished. But if you look at those babies 
again after three or four months they do not 
look nearly as much alike as they did in the first 
week of their lives. In weight, in color, in ac- 
tivity, even in disposition, they have changed. 
Each is going his own way, and their roads have 
already diverged to some extent. Look at them 
again after ten years, after twenty years ; wait 
until they have accomplished their three score 
and ten, and they will not only have lost all close 
resemblance, but will have become so different 
that they may almost seem to belong to different 
species. 

Take these two babies who lie so close to- 
gether on the same cot, both fair-haired, blue- 
eyed little mites of about the same weight and 
stature. They are of the same age. Each of 
them comes from a middle-class home, and they 
each will receive all the ordinary advantages of 
a life and upbringing in an American city. They 
may go to school together. They may run each 
other a close race for some years. Their school 
marks may compare well for a year or two. 
They may play in the same groups, the same 



8 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

games. But by the time they are, say, eight 
years old, certain differences are apparent. One 
of them gets his school lessons with ease, is a 
leader among his playmates ; arranges the games 
and chooses the sides; shows actual force of 
character, and finds in opposition and difficulty 
only challenges to combat which he willingly 
and cheerfully accepts. The other has found 
that through the latter months of these eight 
years his school work has become more and more 
difficult. He labors at it, but with decreasing 
success. He repeats the second grade and is 
then placed in the third that he may try to mas- 
ter it if possible, his teacher being more than 
dubious about his success. Among his play- 
mates he takes a subordinate part. He always 
accepts orders, follows other leaders. In his 
games with his playmates he is always "It. " At 
eight years of age we find that these two children 
who started so much alike show very marked 
differences. 

After-life accentuates these differences. The 
first one is successful in his business. He is a 
leader of men, he may even become eminent. 
But the second drops out of school early in life, 



INSTINCT 9 

having found its tasks impossible. There is no 
success for him. If he be fortunate enough to 
have loving relatives, he may be well cared for 
and live happily enough. But if he be forced 
to fight the battle of life alone, he goes under, 
defeated early in the day. He may become the 
tool of unscrupulous men, become a cheap crim- 
inal, or labor at one of those very simple and dis- 
agreeable tasks, fearfully ill-paid, which society 
still requires some unfortunates to perform. He 
may become a ward of the state and spend his 
life in some institution, or he may even perish 
from lack of proper nutrition or shelter, which 
he is quite incapable of providing for himself. 

In a New England city, famous for its cotton 
mills, there is a large machine shop, which 
manufactures machinery for the cotton industry. 
In that machine shop there is, or was, an inter- 
esting figure of a man, interesting, at least to 
the psychologist, or the sociologist. He was, a 
few years ago, apparently about sixty years of 
age, well grown, with white hair and beard. If 
he could have had the attention of a valet and 
a tailor he was capable of becoming a very pre- 
sentable, if not an imposing, figure. His work 



10 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

in the machine shop was to sweep the filings 
from the floor and from the bases of the lathes. 
He had been at that task for about two score 
years. He had gone into the machine shop as a 
boy, with other boys. They had all been set 
to work at the same kind of labor, sweeping, 
dusting, cleaning up, making themselves gener- 
ally useful. One boy after another had gone on, 
had shown some aptitude in the handling of ma- 
chine tools and had been given a lathe or drill, 
had perhaps mastered that and risen higher; 
perhaps had become assistant foreman or fore- 
man. One or two of the group may have studied 
in their spare hours and have acquired greater 
technical skill and theoretic knowledge and have 
become master mechanics. But the man men- 
tioned did not go ahead in that way. He re- 
mained stationary; he continued to sweep the 
iron filings into little piles and to shovel them 
into a small cart, day after day and year after 
year. He saw the other boys pass him, and, no 
doubt, wondered why. He did not dissipate, at 
least not enough to account for his lack of suc- 
cess, he can't be truthfully said to have been 
lazy, but even after forty years he had not be- 



INSTINCT 11 

come an efficient sweeper. Even this simple 
task he did not do well. 

The explanation of the tragedy exemplified 
in this old man's life is to be fonnd in the fact 
of an inferior inherited mechanism, incapable of 
any form of high-class labor. This man, pre- 
sentable and apparently capable thongh he be, 
really possesses snch low mental capacity that 
experience has proved him nnable to keep him- 
self on the same level as his companions and 
friends. He came into the world with an in- 
adequate mental equipment. Though his mus- 
cular equipment was normal, his mentality was 
subnormal; he may even have been feeble- 
minded. Had it not been for the fact that the 
shop for which he worked was willing to pay 
him a pittance, in reality more than he was 
worth, he would have become a burden upon his 
relatives, or have simply starved to death. In 
a word, the mental side of his neuro-museular 
equipment was hopelessly inadequate to enable 
him to win success in a competitive society. 

It should be stated, however, that under cer- 
tain conditions it is possible for a man to possess 
an inadequate mechanism and pass fairly well 



12 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

among his comrades if there happen to be at 
hand someone who will give him the helping 
hand that he needs. A brother, a father, per- 
haps a wife, may furnish just that little extra 
ability, that guidance, without which the man 
would inevitably fail. Now and then one may 
see in the papers the notice of the failure of a 
certain company, composed originally of two 
brothers, and at one time very successful. One 
brother has died and after some lapse of time, 
a year or so, the brother who is left proves him- 
self incapable of managing the company. This 
incapacity has never been suspected by his asso- 
ciates during the lifetime of the brother now 
dead. The probable explanation of this and 
similar cases is that one brother has all his life 
been slightly below normal, mentally. As long 
as he had assistance and sympathetic guidance, 
his inability was unnoticed, but when circum- 
stances forced him to operate by himself he was 
not quite capable of meeting the requirements 
of the situation. 

Two extremes have been mentioned, that of 
the man who is extremely generously equipped, 
that of the one who is not sufficiently equipped. 






INSTINCT 13 

between these two extremes there are all de- 
grees of adequacy in mental equipment. In any- 
large group of men there will be found those 
who have been generously treated by nature and 
those with whom nature has dealt in a niggardly 
manner. 

The equipment with which men and other ani- 
mals begin life consists of that nervous muscular 
mechanism by means of which certain forms of 
adjustment are made. All animals in the be- 
ginning of their life are capable of certain set 
movements. These may be simple or very com- 
plex, but they do not have to be learned. The 
ability to perform them is inborn. 

In its simplest form such movement is termed 
"protoplasmic irritability. ' ' The unicellular 
Amoeba proteus possesses the power of moving 
away from a drop of dilute acid, from an over- 
heated or underheated area of the culture water 
in which it dwells, or from the touch of the point 
of a glass rod. It moves toward the decaying 
scrap of straw about which are clustered bac- 
teria, its food material. Why it so moves one 
cannot say except in terms of purposes achieved 
or to be achieved, but likewise no one can say 



14 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOP 

why an iron filing moves toward a magnet, nor 
why a comet moves through the Empyrean. 
The occurrence of such movement is the elemen- 
tary fact from which we start. 

A more complicated form of innate or inborn 
movement is known as "reflex." Reflexes differ 
from the above-mentioned irritability only in the 
fact that it occurs in multicellular organisms and 
is the form which the more primitive irritability 
must of necessity take when muscles and bones 
are present. The reflex contraction of a muscle, 
for instance, the muscle of the eyelid as an ob- 
ject suddenly approaches the eye, is of exactly 
the same nature as the withdrawal of an Amoeba 
from a drop of weak acid. But the mechanism 
which produces the reflex is more complicated. 

Still higher in the scale of complexity are 
those movements which we know as " instincts.' ' 
Instinct is movement, not knowledge. We in- 
stinctively do, we do not instinctively know. 
Possibly this statement should be subjected to a 
certain degree of limitation, but in its essentials 
it will certainly be regarded as true by the ma- 
jority of psychologists and physiologists. 

Definitions of instinct vary somewhat, but 



INSTINCT 15 

either of the following is probably acceptable to 
the majority of psychologists. Professor Ed. 
Claparede of Geneva says that instinct "is an 
act adapted and accomplished, withont having 
been learned, in a uniform fashion for all in- 
dividuals of the same species, without knowledge 
of the end aimed at, nor of the relation "between 
that end and the means taken to attain it. " x 

Professor J. B. Watson of Johns Hopkins in a 
recent book writes, "We should define instinct 
as an hereditary pattern reaction, the separate 
elements of which are movements principally of 
the striped muscles. 2 It might otherwise be 
expressed as a combination of explicit congeni- 
tal responses unfolding serially under appropri- 
ate stimulation. " 3 In another place Watson 
explains that by "pattern reaction" "we mean 
that the separate details of response appear 
with some constancy, with some regularity and 
in approximately the same sequential order 
each time the exciting stimulus is presented." 4 

i Claparede, Ed., "Theorie Biologique du Sommeil," Arch, de 
Psychol., 1905, p. 279. 

2 I.e., the voluntary muscles. 

s Watson, J. B., "Psychology from the Standpoint of a Be- 
haviorist," p. 231. ±Ibid., p. 195. 



16 TOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

It may be that a simpler statement than either 
of the above will serve us here, and therefore for 
the purposes of this discussion instinct may be 
defined as movement, the form or order of which 
is determined by an inherited neural-muscular 
mechanism, and which operates to preserve and 
perpetuate the species which possesses or prac- 
tices it. 

If an animal is placed in a certain kind of 
situation, it may happen that that animal at once 
adapts itself to its surroundings, even if those 
surroundings and the movements of adaptation 
are very complicated. But for this to be possi- 
ble the situation must bear a definite and close 
relation to the environment to which that species 
of animal is accustomed. The child only a few 
hours old will close its hand upon the finger of 
its mother or upon a pencil if it is held touching 
the palm of the child's hand. Given appropri- 
ate stimuli, the lips and features in general make 
the sucking reaction, and still earlier in the life 
of the infant it is a touch of cold air upon its 
body which first calls forth or excites the res- 
piratory movement. Such actions as these are 



INSTINCT 17 

instincts. They differ from reflexes chiefly in 
their complexity. 

But many more marvellous reactions than 
these are to be observed. It is doubtful if in 
the whole world of nature there are any fields 
more apt to awaken wonder than the fields of 
instinct. So truly do instinctive reactions meet 
the requirements of the situations which call 
them forth that to a casual glance they seem to 
be the result of long-continued and careful 
thought. But yet it is impossible that if they be 
the product of thought, that thought can be on 
the part of the individual making the instinctive 
movement. And this is obviously true for the 
very simple reason that the young animal, hu- 
man or other, will make these instinctive move- 
ments without there being the least possibility 
of any training, or of the existence of any de- 
gree of former knowledge of the act and its 
results. 

One of the most amazing forms of instinctive 
response is that found in bird migration. As is 
well known, there are birds which spend one- 
half of the year in one part of the world and the 
remainder in an entirely different part. A most 



18 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

interesting example is found in the following 
quotation. "The American Golden Plover is 
known to travel in the neighborhood of fifteen 
thousand miles a year. Its breeding grounds 
are well within the Arctic Circle far beyond the 
northern tree line. In fact Gen. Greeley, the 
Arctic explorer, found it nesting at 81° N. lati- 
tude, within six hundred miles of the North 
Pole. These remarkable birds arrive in the far 
north about June 1st, remaining there approxi- 
mately ten weeks. By the latter part of August, 
nesting duties completed, they have already trav- 
elled as far south as Labrador where a rich tem- 
porary feeding ground supplies them while the 
crowberries, common to that region, are ripen- 
ing. From Labrador they move farther south to 
Nova Scotia, and thence straight out over the 
open ocean eighteen hundred miles to the islands 
that lie east of Cuba and Porto Rico, sometimes 
breaking the journey at the Bermudas eight 
hundred miles south of Nova Scotia but more 
frequently passing by to the eastward. From 
the eastern Antilles to the continent of South 
America is a flight of six hundred miles more, 
and after this mainland is reached they press 



INSTINCT 19 

on to the Pampas region of Patagonia where 
they remain for the winter months, eight thou- 
sand miles from their nesting grounds. March 
finds them on the move again as far north as 
Guatemala and Texas. During April they are 
traversing the Mississippi valley, in May the 
vast territory of Canada, while early in June 
they are nest-building again in the land of the 
midnight sun, having completed the fifteen thou- 
sand mile circuit." 5 It is probable that these 
birds are the greatest of living travelers. 

The question as to how these birds find their 
way is at once suggested. How do the young 
birds know the route to be followed? What 
urges them to leave the place where they have 
been hatched and raised, and to journey so far 
and so long? As to how they find their way, the 
problem to-day is unanswered. No one knows. 
But the facts concerning such flights are indis- 
putable. Although there is evidence that the 
routes of migration have changed, not from year 
to year, but from half century to half century, 
the main fact remains true that birds hatched 

5 Walter, H. E., "Theories of Bird Migration," School Sci- 
ence and Mathematics, April-May, 1908. 



20 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

in one country may leave and fly many thousand 
miles to another country, though they have 
never been over the route before. 

It is worth while to speak of the various pur- 
poses of instinct. They may be briefly summed 
up as four in number. In the first place instinct 
exists to preserve life. The instincts of this type 
are those which have to do with food getting, 
and with the avoiding of danger. In each of 
these cases it is obvious that the animal uses the 
particular apparatus with which Nature has pro- 
vided it, and the varied reactions of animals of 
different species in similar situations are differ- 
ent in form because of the extremely different 
mechanisms possessed by those different species. 
Animals of the cat tribe lie in wait for their 
food, exhibiting what seems to men to be an al- 
most inconceivable degree of patience. A dog 
or a wolf runs its game, a type of action in which 
no cat ever indulges naturally, and which can- 
not ordinarily be taught it. The action in each 
of these cases is not the result of a careful 
consideration of the best means to an end but 
is, literally, the only way in which the animal 
can accomplish that end. The cat of course 



INSTINCT 21 

lies in wait for the mouse. From the feline 
standpoint it is the only method of obtaining 
food. The dog of course chases the rabbit. 
It is inconceivable to the dog that there is any 
other thing to do. And when it comes to the 
method of killing its game, the dog, the cat, the 
eagle and the cobra will each use his own methods 
of offense. The herbivorous animal will seek its 
food in its own particular way. These animals 
are all alike in that they exhibit the food-taking 
reaction. They are different in the particular 
form which that reaction assumes for each of 
them. 

The second purpose which instinct accom- 
plishes in animal life is that of perpetuating the 
race. Two forms of this attitude may be men- 
tioned. There is, first of all, the sex instinct, 
properly so called, exhibited by all higher ani- 
mals, including man. The sex instinct is seasonal 
in its appearance, less so as regards man than 
the other animals. The sex instinct when it ap- 
pears is liable to dominate all behavior, though 
the higher the type of the animal concerned the 
smaller will be the degree of this domination. 

The second form which sex instinct assumes 



22 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

is usually known as parental instinct. This is 
to be understood as the activity of the parent 
animals in caring for their young, and is ex- 
emplified in the providing of a nest, burrow or 
other type of home, in the procuring of food 
adapted to the young, and in the protection of 
them from wild animals which would make them 
their prey. It would be impossible in the limited 
space available to even mention the many ways 
in which this instinct presents itself, the thou- 
sand and one nests that birds build, the many 
forms of home or burrow which animals con- 
struct or discover for their young, the innumer- 
able examples of industry and of courage on the 
part of parent animals in caring for and pro- 
tecting their offspring. From our standpoint 
at present the salient fact is the narrow way in 
which the particular kind of nest built or of food 
provided is limited to a particular species. Sup- 
pose one should take a young robin and an 
oriole and a sand martin and a sparrow and 
bring them up in the same cage, probably an 
impossible thing to actually do. But let us 
imagine them growing up together until they 
become of mating age. Then provide the ma- 



INSTINCT 23 

terial for nest building and watch these four 
birds build their nests. It is to be understood 
that no one of them has seen a nest before. They 
certainly have never practised at nest building. 
But they will construct a nest of some sort. The 
stimulus takes the form of some mysterious 
urging within them, physiological'changes in the 
body of the bird, undoubtedly, and a very com- 
plicated series of reactions is the result. But 
when finished the oriole will have built an oriole 's 
nest, the robin will have built a nest of straw 
and feathers and soft mud and have shaped it 
with its breast after the manner of all robins, 
the martin will have driven a tunnel into a sand 
bank, and the sparrow will have piled together 
a rather careless heap of straw as sparrows 
always do. 

What a very small variation in the feeding 
habits of birds would result in the destruction 
of their young ! If a hen were given some young 
robins to bring up, the result would be starva- 
tion for the adopted offspring. Only within a 
narrow range can the parents of one species 
care for the young of another. 

Consider the home building of the beaver, the 



24 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

nests constructed by the small rodents, the bur- 
rows or hollows which members of the cat family 
discover and enlarge. Each one of these will 
arrange its domestic surroundings as its ances- 
tors have done from time immemorial. 

Another form of activity which appears on its 
face to be instinctive in nature is curiosity. It 
is very closely related to the fear instincts, 
which are to be classified among those which 
tend to preserve life. But curiosity is some- 
thing other than fear. It takes the form of an 
interest in new objects which is often suf- 
ficiently strong to overcome prudence. Un- 
doubtedly because of this impulse, animals may 
find new food and recognize new enemies. In its 
highest form, which is seen in man, it has made 
the progress of civilization possible. It has given 
us geographical discoveries, scientific research 
and invention. Because of it the world has 
moved, without it we still would be where our 
primitive ancestors were. 

There is another type of activity, of a very 
different sort, which may probably be considered 
as instinctive, and that is the resting or sleeping 
reaction. Sleep seems to correspond to the pre- 



INSTINCT 25 

cise definition of instinct. It depends, as far as 
its manner, duration and periodicity are con- 
cerned, npon an inherited mechanism. And it 
accomplishes a purpose which is not apparent 
to the animal indulging in it. The purpose of 
sleep is not to remove the effects of exhaustion 
or of intoxication caused by the presence in the 
system of the waste products of activity, but to 
prevent the appearance of exhaustion or of in- 
toxication. That is to say that sleep appears 
before total exhaustion sets in. It is not pri- 
marily reparative in nature, but preventative. 
Of the actual mechanism of sleep very little in- 
deed is known. 6 Some forms of recreation, and 
some unusual forms of sleep, such as hiberna- 
tion, may be classed with ordinary slumber in 
this statement. 

Many authors make a much longer list of in- 
stincts than these four. The length of the list 
depends somewhat upon the standpoint from 
which classification is approached. In the fore- 
going statement the basis of classification is that 

6 For an interesting and complete statement of this theory 
of sleep see Claparede, Ed., "Theorie Biologique du Sommeil," 
Arch, de Psychol, 1905, pp. 245-349. 



26 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

of the purpose, value or meaning of the reaction 
to the species. There are innumerable forms 
which instinctive reaction takes, but it is difficult 
to discover any fundamental purpose served 
other than these four : self-preservation, repro- 
duction, curiosity and prevention of exhaus- 
tion. 

Speaking somewhat vaguely and generally it 
may be said that individuals of a species have a 
specific resemblance to each other in terms of 
their instincts. This is literally true in so far 
as the members of the species possess identical 
neural-muscular systems. But while it is true 
that members of the same species will possess 
the same fighting or fear instincts, it is also true 
that they will express these in terms of whatever 
peculiarities their individual neural-muscular 
mechanisms may exhibit. One deer will be 
swifter in flight and more cunning in dodging 
its pursuers than another. It will therefore 
have a certain advantage in the struggle for ex- 
istence. One man may possess certain instincts 
in a more strongly determined way than another. 
Both of two men who possess all the ordinary 
instincts for self-preservation may do so in dif- 



INSTINCT 27 

f erent degrees. To one man the instinct for self- 
preservation may be the ruling force in his life. 
To another man, these may be of comparatively 
small importance. To one person sex may be 
the central and the most appealing factor in life. 
To another person it may be almost non-existent, 
to a third an instinct calling forth only a moder- 
ate amount of thought and reaction. 

So that the statement made at the first part of 
this chapter regarding the matter of how people 
differ, is true. To be sure one man will not 
differ from another as much as a man differs 
from a dog, or a dog from a fox, but one man 
differs from another in so far as the equipment 
with which he starts life goes, far more than the 
average person suspects. The Great Teacher 
once said that to one man may be given ten tal- 
ents, to another but one. This statement remains 
as true in psychology as in other fields. 






CHAPTER TWO 

HABIT 

THE second main group of factors which 
determine the differences between people 
we are accustomed to speak of under the name of 
1 ' habit.' ' Instincts are not permanently rigid. 
On the contrary, they possess very considerable 
plasticity. As has been stated, an animal be- 
gins life with a tendency to move in a definite 
way in certain circumstances. As the animal 
grows older and achieves various degrees of 
success in these different circumstances the par- 
ticular form of the instinctive reactions may 
change. This fact has been named by James 
the "inhibition of instinct by habit. ' ' A similar 
fact, very closely related in nature to this he 
terms the "transitoriness of instinct." This is 
the fact that if an instinct be not allowed to ex- 
press itself at the time when the organism is 
ripe for it, it may be that that instinct will never 
appear. For instance, consider the hereditary 

28 



HABIT 29 

enmity between dogs and cats. It is a very diffi- 
cult matter indeed to take an old dog and an old 
cat and keep them peaceably together in the 
same house, but it is not at all difficult to place 
a kitten and a puppy together, and bring them 
up side by side. They may even become good 
friends. The point is that in the latter case, 
at the age at which the instinctive aversion of 
the two animals each for the other should ap- 
pear, circumstances have prevented the expres- 
sion of this aversion. That particular instinc- 
tive tendency has disappeared, and, in all prob- 
ability, will never reappear, at least in so far as 
the attitude of those two animals toward each 
other is concerned. The instinct has been com- 
pletely destroyed. 

Experiments on the mouse-catching instinct in 
kittens have shown that if a kitten be kept from 
all forms of sensory contact with mice until it 
is about five months old, the instinct to pursue 
and attack mice on sight seems to vanish. And 
if kittens are put in the proximity of mice daily 
from their earliest infancy the instinct to attack 
and kill them appears at an age varying from 
six weeks to about two and a half to three 



30 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

months. It is interesting to note that when the 
instinct does appear it appears all at once, prac- 
tically full grown. And the kitten killing for 
the first time will use practically the same reper- 
toire of movements which the old and experi- 
enced mouser exhibits. 1 

When one speaks of the inhibition of instinct 
by habit the reference is to the fact that it is 
simply the general tendency which is common to 
members of a species, the special operations of 
that instinct being individual. It is instinc- 
tive in all human infants to try to walk at an 
age varying from eight or nine months to two 
years, but the particular form of walk which 
they acquire is a matter of individual habit. It 
will depend upon the conditions in which they 
have learned to walk, on the kind of footgear 
they wear, to some extent upon whether they live 
on the plains or in mountainous countries. All 
human beings walk — that is instinct, — but we 
each have our own idiosyncratic way of getting 
over the ground — that is habit. 

i See Yerkes, K. M., and Bloomfield, D., "Do Kittens In- 
stinctively Kill Mice?" Psychol. Bulletin, Vol. 7. Also Berry, 
"Experimental Study of Imitation in Cats," Journal of Co-mp. 
tfeur. and Psychol., Vol. 18, pp. 1-25. 



HABIT 31 

The food-taking instinct is found in all ani- 
mals, human and other. It appears in mammals 
as the sucking reaction, in chicks as the pecking 
reaction, in many other yonng birds in the form 
of the familiar wide-mouthed gaping when the 
parent bird is present. In the case of the baby 
it is a long way from that instinctive activity to 
the somewhat complicate and accurate handling 
of knife and fork which is required of the aver- 
age adult in Western lands. But the method 
of taking food indulged in by the cultured adult 
is but the habitual modification of the funda- 
mental food-taking instinct. 

The fighting instinct is present in man, but it 
does not express itself as it does in the lower 
animals, at least, not often. Wild and vigorous 
animals make use of the tools which nature has 
given them. This instinct itl man expresses 
itself in a very complicated management of me- 
chanical agencies in the form of guns, explosive 
shells and gases, and is very far removed indeed 
from the elemental form. But all this is, after 
all, merely a modification of the original instinct. 
From the theoretic standpoint it is a most 
interesting thing that confronts us here — the 



32 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

method of habit formation. How does the in- 
stinct become transformed? Why does it not 
maintain its original form ? Or, to put the same 
question in a slightly more popular form, how 
does learning take place? 

The learning process may best be diseussed 
under two headings, "unconscious" and " con- 
scious' ' learning. Unconscious learning is fre- 
quently referred to as "trial and error" learn- 
ing. It is the type of learning which modifies 
very many of our movements, unknown to our- 
selves. We have been doing a certain familiar 
act for a long time, and suddenly wake up to find 
that we are doing it in a totally new way. We do 
not know at what point we changed the form of 
reaction. For instance, after we have been play- 
ing tennis for some time, we may find that the 
form of our serve has undergone a change. At 
first we rather laboriously and consciously aimed 
the racquet so that it would hit the ball at a 
certain point in the air. Time and time again 
we did it, until the conscious aim disappeared. 
Suddenly one day, months after, we found that 
we had acquired in serving a sweep and general 
form of movement which was very different 



HABIT 33 

from the clumsy and labored movement with 
which we began. 

Such learning, as has been said, is called "trial 
and error" learning, and many examples simi- 
lar to the above might be given. Suppose some 
one hands you one of those irritatingly attrac- 
tive little puzzles consisting of a brass disc and 
a ring, or some comphcated steel wire arrange- 
ment. The object is to remove the ring which 
is threaded through holes in a small brass disc, 
or to separate the star-shaped bit of metal from 
the steel loop which confines it. You take the 
puzzle and you work with it, turning it this way 
and that, putting the ring through this hole and 
the other, and finally, more or less to your sur- 
prise, the ring comes off the disc. You put it 
on again and perhaps are patient enough to 
take it off a second time. Eepeat that process 
two or three, a dozen times, fifty times, and one 
finds that the method of removing the ring be- 
comes perfectly automatic and the process ex- 
tremely easy. But let a friend ask you how to 
do it and your answer will almost invariably be : 
"I can't tell you how to do it, but I can show 
you." A definite motor habit has been formed 



34 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

without there being very much conscious direc- 
tion in its formation. 

Interesting and accurate studies of this meth- 
od of learning have been made of both animals 
and man. Perhaps the most interesting of them 
have come from the field of animal psychology. 
Animals will learn to make very involved re- 
actions in just about the same way that the man 
learns to swing a tennis racquet or to handle 
the little puzzle mentioned above. Set a prob- 
lem for a dog or a monkey or a white rat. It 
must be understood, of course, that when you 
set a problem for any of these animals it must 
be a dog or monkey or white rat problem. It 
goes without saying that a dog can't solve hu- 
man problems. It can, however, solve problems 
at its own level. Perhaps the most familiar of 
these types of problems is known as the puzzle 
box problem. 

A box is constructed of a size appropriate to 
the animal to be examined. The box is made of 
wire netting so that its interior is open to easy 
observation. It is closed in the front by a door 
having spring hinges. The door is fastened by 
means of a very simple lock, perhaps a peg 



HABIT 35 

driven loosely into a hole, or by an ordinary 
thnnib latch, or by a hook. In the box is placed 
some food, bread and milk for the rat or cat, 
banana or apple for a monkey, meat if it be a 
dog. The animal, moderately hungry, is placed 
in the room where this box is situated. The 
problem for the animal is to get the food. It 
is true that the conditions are artificial, but the 
problem is not, for it is exactly the kind of 
problem which faces all wild animals in the 
course of every-day life, and which becomes 
especially acute in any period of food scarcity. 
What does the animal do under these circum- 
stances f He simply applies all the forms of in- 
stinctive activity which he has at his command 
to the box. The monkey swarms all over it, 
forces or tries to force his paw between the 
wires, bites at the corners, gnaws, pulls, twists. 
The dog does much the same thing, but is less 
richly equipped with various movements and 
less resourceful in his methods of attack than 
the monkey. The white rat in turn uses all the 
white rat methods of attacking the problem. 

What happens 1 In the course of time, limited 
by chance or accident, the animal stumbles upon 



36 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

the peg which closes the door, pulls it, nozzles it, 
bites it, in some way or other removes it and 
the door opens. The animal immediately enters 
and gets the food. The next day the experiment 
is repeated, but from the standpoint of the ani- 
mal there is an important modification of the 
situation, which essentially alters the reactions 
of the animal. The dog or rat naturally pays far 
more attention to that part of the box through 
which it entered the day before than it does to 
the rest of the box. And since its activity is so 
largely confined to the region of the door, it, of 
course, gets the door open much sooner than 
on the previous occasion. Day after day for 
six, eight or ten days the procedure is repeated, 
and a very marked decrease in the length of time 
required to open the door is noticed. This de- 
crease of time stands in pretty direct proportion 
to the concentration of the activities of the ani- 
mal upon the area immediately surrounding the 
lock. At the end of the training period what- 
ever it may be — ten or fifteen days — the animal 
is capable of entering the room, going at once 
to the door, pulling the peg or lifting the latch 
and getting its food without wasting any time 



HABIT 37 

whatsoever. The complexity of the lock which 
an animal may learn to open in this manner is 
surprising. 

Now observe that the animal has not been 
taught tricks. It has simply been placed in the 
face of a certain situation and told, as it were, to 
solve its problem or starve. Animals must face 
just such situations in wild life, and there the 
choice between solution and starvation is a real 
one. There is reason for believing that the 
qualities of activity and persistence which en- 
able one animal to solve the artificial problem 
in a time shorter than others of the same spe- 
cies would also enable that animal in wild life to 
obtain food when another had failed and died. 

Conscious effort in learning does not intro- 
duce any really new methods. It speeds up the 
process described above. Instead of groping 
blindly for the methods of solving a problem, one 
obtains them by a systematic survey of the field 
of possibilities and a choice of that method which 
seems most available, or appears nearest at 
hand. That one method may be chosen rather 
than another is to be attributed to one's past 
experience. In the latter case the experience 



38 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

may have been acquired in the course of events, 
by reading, by conversation or in some more for- 
mally didactic way. The variety of choice pos- 
sible to man as compared with the lower animals 
is the result of the richness of his experience, 
and of his superior power of retaining and 
imaging these. 

It might ne possible to state all education in 
terms of habit acquisition. It is necessary to 
consider expertness in this way. The expert is 
the person who has acquired a large group of 
habitual adjustments in his field. He differs 
from the tyro in regard to the proportion of the 
field which he can cover habitually. The fact of 
being able to handle operations in an habitual 
manner has certain definite and very valuable 
advantages. The practical effects of habit in- 
clude the following. 

First: the possession of habitual methods of 
adjustment decreases fatigue. Operations which 
are performed habitually are performed easily. 
The act which we are doing for the first time is 
difficult, other things being equal, it is less diffi- 
cult the thousandth time. In any adjustment 
which is performed under habitual conditions, 



HABIT 39 

the amount of energy expended is immensely less 
than in the case of the same operation performed 
for the first time. 

In the second place, the habitual manner of 
performing an operation is more accurate than 
any other. It is much more accurate than the 
first non-habitual reaction of the same kind. In 
other words, if you wish to do a thing well you 
must do it habitually. Accuracy is to be found 
where there is a high degree of habit formation. 
This statement may seen novel and possibly un- 
true to many readers, but it does not require 
much reflection to discover its truth. Very many 
things which we do well we do habitually. Very 
many things which we do badly we do with a 
high degree of care. Take, for instance, such 
an ordinary motor activity as walking. Any 
adult, unless he be crippled, is capable of walk- 
ing with ease and for long periods of time with- 
out thinking of it at all, even though it be neces- 
sary to alter the rate or the method of walking. 
One may walk around obstacles, climb steps, de- 
scend inclines and all with a small amount of 
conscious direction, or even with no such direc- 
tion at all. But the same process of walking 



40 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

becomes clumsy and difficult if for any reason 
whatever our attentive care is exercised toward 
it. Let the reader for the first time walk across 
a stage or platform in front of five or six hun- 
dred people, arid he will realize that there is 
more to walking than he had thought. The ex- 
erting of care in taking up and putting down 
the feet becomes for the first time a task, and the 
whole reaction is performed rather badly. In 
the same way, a person may fail to perform 
satisfactorily in public an involved series of 
movements, even though they have been thor- 
oughly learned in private. A person who can 
play the piano or recite the verses of a poem 
perfectly if no one is listening, may find it 
extremely difficult to do so if a crowd of people 
observe his effort. Or if for any extraordinary 
reason a particular reaction suddenly assumes 
unusual importance it may at the same time 
assume unusual difficulty. In such cases what 
happens is that the performer has taken a 
group of movements which by the expenditure 
of great labor have been placed upon the habit- 
ual level, and has given them conscious direc- 
tion. The result is disastrous and it necessarily 



HABIT 41 

follows that such operations meet with a very 
small degree of success, and are done inaccu- 
rately. 

Another example of the statement just made, 
is to be found in the control of certain move- 
ments. Practically all movements are made by 
two muscles, a flexor and an extensor, working 
on opposite sides of a bone lever. When a move- 
ment is made with careful attention, both the 
muscles concerned are more or less contracted, 
the lever being, as it were, swung between them 
as between two tensed cables. Such a method 
of moving requires the contraction of two 
muscles throughout the whole extent of the 
movement. When that same movement becomes 
habitual, it seems to be controlled by one muscle 
throughout the first third or so of its course, it 
swings freely throughout the middle third of 
the movement and is controlled by the opposing 
muscle throughout the last third of its course. 
Instead of there being two muscles tensed 
throughout the entire movement, as is the case 
when attention is present, there is one muscle 
tensed for two-thirds of the movement. That 
fatigue is decreased in this way, is obvious. 



42 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

Accuracy also is increased, because when the 
bone lever in question is handled by the two sets 
of muscles on the opposing sides the method of 
maintaining accuracy really consists in swinging 
the lever a little too far in one direction and 
then bringing it back too far in the other. For 
instance, a straight line drawn under conditions 
of attentive control, if with a hard pencil on 
a smooth surface, shows zigzags under a read- 
ing glass, while a straight line drawn with the 
same pencil, on the same surface under habitual 
conditions is made with a free swing and does 
not show zigzags under the glass. 

The former type of movements are known as 
controlled movements, and the latter as ballistic. 
Because of the conditions mentioned, it is ex- 
tremely difficult to forge successfully the signa- 
ture of a man accustomed to writing his signa- 
ture. The lines of the signature, when forged, 
must be drawn under conditions of attentive 
control, which means that they contain slight 
zigzags or irregularities, while the actual sig- 
nature, being produced by ballistic movements, 
has no such zigzags. The forgery will, there- 
fore, be easily detected. It is more easy to forge 



HABIT 43 

the signature of the illiterate man who seldom 
writes his name. The reason for this is that 
when such a man does write his signature, he 
does it under conditions of attentive control, 
and it therefore presents the typical peculiari- 
ties of controlled movements. 

The third practical value of habit is that the 
habitual movement may be successfully accom- 
plished and at the same time the higher centers 
of the brain may be kept active along other lines, 
or kept free for such activity, if necessity for 
it should arise. In other words, habitual move- 
ments do not require all one's conscious intelli- 
gence. The habitual movements may be per- 
formed accurately and easily and at the same 
time the higher centers may be free to work 
upon other problems. The statement is some- 
times made that a person cannot do two things 
at once. The statement is really untrue. A 
person may do two things at once if one of them 
is of an habitual nature 

The conditions of expertness have been stated 
in the preceding statement of the practical ef- 
fects of habit. The man who can make a great 
variety of movements habitually, makes them 



44 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

easily and with accuracy and without becoming 
incapable of thinking along other lines while he 
is performing the habitual acts. Put in the posi- 
tive instead of the negative, it is, for example, 
perfectly possible for a person to learn to read 
in public, and, while reading with expression, to 
think about something other than his reading. 
The ball player may make all the necessary 
muscular movements of catching or picking up 
a hall and throwing it, and be thinking of some- 
thing else all the time, for instance the arrange- 
ment of the opposing players on the bases. In 
fact, it is the very sine qua non of expertness 
that he shall do this. If it takes a man's whole 
attentive consciousness to pick up a baseball, or 
to throw it after it is picked up, he will not be 
able to decide where to throw it until after it is 
picked up. The great expert is capable of 
making complicated and vigorous adjustments 
which a situation calls for, and while doing so to 
calmly decide what shall be his next movement. 
The writer quite clearly remembers the first 
major operation he observed. His ideas of major 
operations had prepared him for a scene some- 
what different from that which presented itself. 



HABIT 45 

An operation had always seemed an extremely 
serious, not to say solemn, occasion, and he had 
expected to find an air of extreme exertion, of 
tense endeavor hanging over it. Instead the 
situation actually appeared rather carefree and 
easy. The operator was one of the really great 
surgeons of the United States. He went at his 
work (an abdominal section) with an almost off- 
hand ease and an enthusiasm which seemed care- 
less. Now and then he even appeared to take his 
eyes away from his work to address the students 
who were gathered in the amphitheater about. 
The impression upon the mind of the unsophis- 
ticated young observer who was watching him 
was that he was being a little careless. But the 
apparent carelessness was certainly not that, it 
came from the fact that the work was being done 
in an habitual manner, that is, mechanically. As 
a matter of fact, the operation which the surgeon 
was performing was an operation which had 
probably been performed by him hundreds of 
times. His hands were making the most beauti- 
ful mechanical job of it. The effect of the hab- 
itual handling of the situation was that it was 
being done with a high degree of accuracy. 



46 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

From the operator's standpoint the work was 
requiring only a small amount of energy, hence 
fatigue was absent, and most important of all, 
the higher intellectual centers of the surgeon 
were comparatively free. Thus in case of the 
occurrence of a catastrophe of any kind, the 
surgeon would have opportunity and thought to 
handle the new situation even though it were 
imperative that the routine movement of the 
operation continue. In sharp and significant 
distinction from the easy habitual movements of 
the surgeon was the strained attention, the over- 
whelming care exercised by an interne who stood 
at his elbow and assisted him in some trifling 
details. To the interne the situation was still 
novel. 

To sum up this portion of the discussion: if 
a person would become an expert in his field it 
is necessary that he reduce large parts of it to 
habitual performance. The expert differs from 
the tyro in regard to the amount he does by 
habit. The expert does by habit what the tyro 
or amateur does with a great deal of care, and 
the expert will do with care things which the 
amateur cannot dream even of attempting. 



HABIT 47 

There is another side to the fact of habit which 
must not be neglected. Habit is the result of im- 
pressions produced by a certain situation, often 
repeated. But an impression, and a permanent 
one, is produced by even one experience of any 
kind. Hence, learning. We learn because we 
have to face puzzling situations or problems. 
Now the circumstances which affect us, the sit- 
uations in which we are placed, even the books 
we read, the persons we meet and converse with, 
the schools we attend, the cities we live in — all 
leave impressions upon us, and it is vitally true, 
as said above, that these impressions are per- 
manent. We can neither disregard nor destroy 
our past; that which has come into life cannot 
be forced out ; that which we have seen has reg- 
istered itself upon us ; the words we have heard 
have engraved themselves upon permanent tab- 
lets of habit and memory. It is psychologically 
true that 

"The moving finger writes, and having writ 
Moves on, nor all your piety nor wit 
Can lure it back to cancel half a line 
Nor all your tears wipe out a word of it." 



48 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

Character is not constructed in a moment, but 
is the product or the result of one's experience, 
one 's past. This statement must be understood 
in the light of what has been said in this and 
the preceding chapter, and also in connection 
with the chapter on Character Formation. The 
personality of John Smith differs from that of 
Thomas Jones because of two facts — first, be- 
cause John Smith and Thomas Jones started 
life with different mechanisms, with different 
neural muscular equipments, and, second, be- 
cause these two have lived in different environ- 
ments, met different problems and experiences, 
and, because of their uneven equipments, have 
handled in different ways whatever similar situ- 
ations have confronted them. Thereby they 
have of necessity acquired different opinions, 
different ambitions, different habits, and differ- 
ent sets of values. 



CHAPTER THREE 



HABITS OF STUDY 



A STUDENT is a person who studies. He 
may or may not be registered in a school 
or college. Very many people who are not pupils 
of any teacher or school are yet students in 
every proper sense of the word. That is to say, 
they have an interest in certain material, and are 
attempting to obtain a thorough understanding 
and appreciation of that material. Much of 
what follows in this chapter and in the chapter 
immediately succeeding may seem to be applic- 
able only to young people in school or college, 
but, as a matter of fact, it applies with equal 
truth to the efforts of anyone who is trying to 
master or comprehend any serious material in 
any field. All men and women working seriously 
with any subject which requires any effort at 
all, other than manual, must be students to some 
extent. Such people must know something of the 
principles involved in the work being done. Nine 



50 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

times out of ten there is considerable memoriza- 
tion to be accomplished. Only the rare person 
who entirely lacks ambition for advancement can 
get along without any study whatsoever. What 
is true of the methods of studying in one field 
is also true, with certain obvious changes, of 
the methods of studying in all others. What 
follows applies as truly to the young lawyer, 
stenographer, artisan or housekeeper as it does 
to the pupil in school or college. 

For the person who has ambition along stu- 
dious lines it is first of all necessary that he 
possess some habits of regular study. If you 
are really serious in your attitude toward the 
opportunities which school, college or your pro- 
fession can furnish you, it is absolutely neces- 
sary, if you would work with effect and economy, 
to have some perfectly definite ways and meth- 
ods of studying. The advantages of having 
habits of study are precisely the advantages of 
habit formation which we find anywhere else. 

These advantages consist in the acquisition 
of ease in studying and in economy; of effort. 
Studying may actually be made easy by habit. 
The person who studies regularly over a long 



HABITS OF STUDY 51 

period of time discovers that the same amount 
of painstaking effort will accomplish more and 
more as the time goes on. He acquires facility 
in study. The rewards of his studious efforts 
increase out of all proportion to the labor ex- 
pended as the process becomes habitual. 

Further, accuracy in study is increased by 
habitual regularity. That is to say, if one has 
the habit of studying in a certain definite way, in 
a certain definite place, at certain definite times, 
more will be gotten out of the material under 
investigation in a stated time than if one studies 
in desultory methods and at accidentally chosen 
times and places. If one has formed a pretty 
persistent habit of application at certain times 
the act of applying one's self becomes easier and 
more productive the longer that regularity is 
maintained, and the result will be that the stu- 
dent who works regularly and according to some 
schedule will obtain more from his books in the 
same time and with the same expenditure of 
energy than the one who works sporadically. 

Perhaps the hardest thing about studying is 
in beginning the period. It is never absolutely 
easy to break off some pleasant conversation or 



52 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

reading and settle down to a period of hard 
study, but I think that this fact of commencing 
is made easier if there be a certain definite time 
at which one habitually starts studying. When 
that time comes one will find that the organism 
is already in the study attitude, as it were, has 
already started to work. 

The importance of routine and regularity in 
study hours cannot be overestimated. It is of 
more significance than the amount of time put 
in. With the sole exception of the possession of 
unusual ability it is the most important factor 
in determining whether or not a certain person 
will be eminently successful in his student or 
professional life. 

Therefore it is wise to emphasize strongly and 
clearly that it is extremely valuable for a student 
to have a regular time and a regular place for 
study. 

When it comes to the suggestion of certain 
definite habits which it is well to form, it must 
be recognized that the details of such habits are 
more or less a matter of opinion or of individual 
variation. Certain particular forms of study 
habit may be more beneficial for one man than 



HABITS OF STUDY 53 

for another. What is now to be said about par- 
ticular study habits is said with this reservation 
in mind. 

Three factors of importance in connection 
with study must be considered. These are the 
matters of the place of study, of the times for 
study, and the duration and intensity of the ac- 
tual study period. 

It is very much worth one's while to expend 
some thought upon the arrangements, or appara- 
tus, for studying. The appointments which are 
necessary generally consist of a desk or table, 
a chair, properly arranged lights, writing ma- 
terials and possibly a few other things. The 
desk should be of a convenient height, adapted 
to the stature of the person working at it, suffi- 
ciently high to bring a book placed upon it within 
easy accommodation range of the eyes without 
undue bending of the back or hunching of the 
shoulders. The chair should be straight-backed, 
moderately hard, and of a height which allows 
the feet to rest upon the floor, and gives sufficient 
elbow room for writing. Of course the heights 
of the chair and desk should be accurately cor- 
related. 



54 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

The lighting of a study table is of immense 
importance. The first rule to remember is that 
there must not be any great spot or area of 
bright light within the visual field. The source 
of illumination should, if possible, be placed out- 
side the visual range. If it must be placed with- 
in the field of vision, it should be shaded or dis- 
persed by a green colored or a frosted glass 
globe. It is much better, however, to have the 
source of light placed outside the range of the 
eyes and reflected into the visual field. It does 
not need to be said that of all lights for reading 
sunlight is the best, and other lights are good 
just in so far as they resemble sunlight. 

In the matter of choosing the time for study- 
ing, individual preferences and conditions of 
life must play a large part. For most students 
the early evening is probably the most conve- 
nient time. For many men the late evening or 
even late at night is very good. The writer has 
known a man to successfully pursue the plan of 
going to sleep immediately after the evening 
meal, awakening at ten or eleven and studying 
from then on until breakfast time. For most 
persons such an arrangement would be impos- 



HABITS OF STUDY 55 

sible. In this particular case it worked very- 
well. It follows that very little advice can be 
given as to time. It must suffice to say that as 
far as possible the time of study should be the 
same on different days. Very few people can 
study with much success who simply use desul- 
tory odds and ends of time for it. William 
James has written something to the effect that 
"some people get all the work done they ever 
do in the interstices of their mind's wander- 
ings." Study or work performed in such a 
manner will not be greatly successful. It will 
just "get by" at the best, and cannot possibly 
produce the high class man in any business or 
profession. 

The duration of the study period may be 
treated a little dogmatically. Shorter periods 
of istudy are more productive than long periods. 
That is to say, if two hours are to be put upon 
a certain kind of study more will be gotten out 
of the time and energy expended if there be four 
periods of thirty minutes each, with short rests 
at the end of each period, than if there be one long 
drawn out period of one hundred and twenty min- 
utes. And the four periods will be more produc- 



56 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

tive than two of one hour each. It may be recom- 
mended to students, particularly to young stu- 
dents, that some such arrangement as this be 
made of their study time. Let the student who 
expects to spend two or three hours in study 
arrange that at the end of every thirty minutes 
there be a break. This break need not be more 
than two or three minutes, but it should be a 
complete break. The person should change the 
position of the body, get up, walk around, alter 
the chain of thought, and ease completely any 
cramped attitude of the body. After spending 
a long time in one position and in one pursuit, 
the efficiency of the organism, for receiving the 
material being studied, decreases very much. 
And relaxation, when it comes, should be com- 
plete, it is not worth while to half relax; the 
resting should be thorough, the work should be 
dismissed from the mind entirely. 

This leads us to the most important rule of 
study with which the writer is familiar. It may 
be stated in a few words, and is simply this: 
"Know when you are studying." 1 Many stu- 

i The writer is indebted for this succinct statement to Pro- 
fessor R. H. Stetson, of Oberlin College. 



HABITS OF STUDY 57 

dents waste a great deal of their time in an 
attitude which is neither hard work nor complete 
rest, bnt half and half. This satisfies neither 
of the desired conditions, not being successful 
study on one hand nor efficient rest on the other. 
A person cannot successfully study reclining in 
a morris chair nor lying on his back or side on 
a bed. If the man is tired, let him spend ten or 
fifteen minutes on the bed or in the morris chair, 
completely relaxing; the rest of the available 
time can then be put in in the study chair, in- 
tently studying. An hour spent in half study 
and half rest will produce less in the way of 
permanent results than would the same hour 
were half of it spent in complete relaxation on 
the couch and the other half in genuine study. 
Furthermore, at the end of an hour spent one- 
half in study and one-half in complete rest, the 
person will be less tired than if the whole hour 
had been spent in an attempt to study and rest 
at the same time. 

There is a wide difference of opinion as to 
the method and value of taking notes, and it is 
not probable that all the remarks made here will 
meet with anything like universal approbation. 



58 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

It has been the observation of the writer 
through several years of teaching that the aver- 
age student takes too many notes. It is com- 
paratively easy for a student to transform him- 
self into a kind of auditory-chirographic mech- 
anism, and to record with a pen the material 
that is heard. But at the same time the student 
may not really be getting very much of what is 
being said. Notes which are taken in this way 
may not leave a very lasting impression upon 
the mind. The work has all to be studied afresh 
from the notes and these may or may not be 
accurate. Objections of the same kind may be 
made to the occasionally seen practice of taking 
complete stenographic notes. Not only does 
such work have to be transcribed but it all has 
to be studied afresh when it is transcribed. The 
point is that in such cases the student concerned 
has gotten very little of the material while it was 
being given, having used all his endeavor in 
making a written record of what was said in 
class. Notes of lectures, if made at all, should 
be analytic and systematic, and not synoptic. 
Often very little that is of value is obtained by 
attempting to synopsize a discussion or a lee- 



HABITS OF STUDY 59 

ture, meaning by synopsis simply an attenuated 
version. But it may often be worth while to 
analyze the lecture, and to record its logical 
development. Of course it is assumed here that 
there are specific divisions and a systematic de- 
velopment of the subject by the lecturer. It 
must be admitted, however, that lectures are oc- 
casionally offered, even by eminent men, which 
seem to lack both logic and system. 

Notes that are made in class should be short, 
systematic, and, above all, thoughtful. A per- 
son who spends ten per cent of his time in the 
class-room in taking notes and the other ninety 
per cent in thinking is in a better case than the 
student who reverses the proportion. Try to 
have the work in your note book so arranged that 
in referring to particular parts of it you will 
be able to use a reasoning or thinking method, 
rather than a memory method. 

A different situation is presented when the 
case is one of making notes from reading. To 
some extent it is true that "legire sine calumo 
est dormire." A careful recording of the es- 
sence of what is read is of value in fixing that 
material in memory and in estimating its value. 



60 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

But here again it is true that such notes should 
be analytic rather than synoptic. 

Now and then it happens, for one reason or 
another, for which the student may or may not 
be responsible, that a particular subject has not 
been gotten in shape for examination and it be- 
comes necessary for that student to spend a 
short space of time in very intense work, in 
" cramming' ' his subject. That practice, while 
generally reprehensible, is not entirely devoid of 
good points. It is of some value to the student 
to have had the experience of being forced to 
cover a great deal of work in a very short time. 
It means that he has to analyze and then absorb 
all the material of the course without outside 
help. Now in professional life it sometimes hap- 
pens that something akin to "cramming" is the 
only practicable method of performing a particu- 
lar task. It is probable that such a method must 
now and then be used by the lawyer in writing 
a brief, by the lecturer or preacher in preparing 
an address of which he has had very short notice, 
or by the physician in mastering the details of 
the literature of some unusual or obscure com- 
plication. On the whole, however, * ' cramming ' ' 



HABITS OF STUDY 61 

is not an advisable way of preparing work, and 
there seems to be little doubt that material 
which is obtained in such a way is not really 
mastered, and is not retained for any great 
length of time. 

In preparing for examination, one rule may 
be stated. Neglect the interesting subject. Pre- 
pare yourself first in the subjects which you dis- 
like and find most difficult. There will always 
be time at the end for the things which are easy 
and pleasant. For obvious reasons it is wise, 
when it comes to the actual writing of the exam- 
ination paper, to answer the easiest questions 
first, then the harder ones. Many a student has 
failed in an examination because he spent too 
large a proportion of his time upon a question 
which he did not succeed after all in answering 
satisfactorily. 

If one's habits of ;study have not produced 
satisfactory results it is advisable to arrange 
new ones. The following familiar advice is 
adapted from the writing of William James. 
First, launch your new habits with energy ; sec- 
ond, seek an early opportunity of putting them 
into practice, and, third, allow no exceptions 



62 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

whatever. To these a fourth rule may be added, 
namely, don't try to do too much, don't make 
your regimen too strenuous, outline a reasonable 
program for yourself. 

The application of regular and persistent hab- 
its of study will have satisfactory results, be- 
yond all doubt. In support of this statement 
note the following paragraph, again a quotation 
from James : 

"As we become permanent drunkards by so 
many separate drinks, so we become saints in the 
moral, and authorities and experts in the prac- 
tical and scientific spheres, by so many separate 
acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any 
anxiety about the upshot of his education, what- 
ever the line of it may be. If he keep faith- 
fully busy each hour of the working day, he may 
leave the final result to itself. He can with 
perfect certainty count on waking up some fine 
morning to find himself one of the competent ones 
of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may 
have singled out." 2 

2 James, William, "Principles of Psychology," Vol. I, p. 127. 



CHAPTER FOUR 

REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING 

MNEMOSYNE, according to the Greek 
mythology, was the mother of the muses. 
From her came all that was creative and valu- 
able in art and literature, science and history. 
Whatever one may think of the mythology of 
the Greeks, there can be no doubt as to the accu- 
racy of their psychology in this respect. It 
would be impossible to overestimate the impor- 
tance of the part played by memory in life. Upon 
memory depends not only the production of 
works of art and literature, but, in fact, all con- 
tinuity of effort and of thought. The memory 
function is the basis of originality, paradoxical 
as this may seem, and it may even be said that, 
other things being equal, the person with the 
most impressionable and retentive memory is 
the most capable and intelligent person. The 
query may even be made as to whether memory 

63 



64 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

does not constitute the very essence of per- 
sonality. 

For the student, certainly, memory is of para- 
mount importance. Not that training in school 
or college should be primarily a training in mem- 
ory but that in so far as it is a training in reason- 
ing, it is thereby to a great extent a training in 
the handling of material which has been mem- 
orized. For reasoning consists in the arranging 
of ideas toward a certain end, to solve a certain 
problem; and ideas may be understood as the 
mass product given us by various experiences, 
which are alike in essentials but which differ in 
details. And of course such mass productions 
or ideas are dependent upon the memory func- 
tion for their very existence. 

There are three parts of the memory process. 
There is first of all the fact of retention, physi- 
ological in nature. In some way experience en- 
graves itself upon the human organism. One 
cannot go through the events of even the most 
placid day without having these events affect in 
some way or other the organism as a whole and 
probably the nervous system in particular. This 
fact has been enlarged upon in the chapter on 



REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING 65 

" Habit." It may do to sum up that discussion 
here in the word that the human organism is 
"wax to receive and marble to retain." We do 
not know exactly how the organism is modified 
by experience but we do know that in some way 
or other experience leaves upon us an impress 
which is to all intents and purposes permanent. 

The second part of the memory process is 
known as recall. When an organism has been 
modified by experience it is capable of producing 
a replica of that experience at some later time. 
It is really not accurate to say that the experi- 
ence is reproduced, that is not exactly what 
occurs — the memory image is not the original 
experience occurring a second time — it is an 
imitation or copy of the first experience, having 
certain definite characteristics of its own, and, 
under ordinary circumstances, is incapable of 
being mistaken for an original experience. Ee- 
call is, therefore, the act of becoming conscious 
of material which has been retained. 

Perhaps the first thing to emphasize about 
recall depends upon the fact that memories are 
retained, and recalled, in closely associated 
groups or chains. Our past is not memorized in 



66 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

the form of a coordinated map, which one can 
examine and on which every event is recorded 
in its proper place ; the fact is, rather, that onr 
memories are arranged in what may be called 
"chains." These chains cross one another, may 
even be tangled, but there is no systematic cross- 
reference between them. I may, for instance, 
have learned to play a certain game during a 
period of weeks in which I was reading the works 
of a certain author. Now, it is perfectly possible 
for me to recall the incidents of my learning to 
play that game, to review my progress in the ac- 
quisition of skill, to remember one or two days 
on which it may have happened that I played 
particularly well, to remember certain definite 
failures. It is also possible for me to remember 
the sequence in which the books of the particular 
author were read, to know how I delighted in 
one more than in others, to understand the 
connection between the books, perhaps to re- 
member the dates, the actual days, on which 
the several books were finished. But it will 
probably be true that I will not be able to re- 
member what book I was reading on the day 
I played a particular game, itself easily remem- 



REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING 67 

bered. In other words, while I may have these 
two series of coincident memories and know both 
of them rather accurately, there may be no cross- 
reference between the series at all. A student 
may be taking several courses at once in college 
and may know the content and order of develop- 
ment of both of these courses perfectly well, but 
may not remember what he was studying in 
course "A" at the time he read a certain poem 
in course "B." Of course in many cases it will 
happen that events in two coincident chains will 
become connected. One may have been driven 
from a game of tennis by the heat of the day and 
have then occupied himself by reading a book. 
That may establish a connection between the two 
chains so that a recall of one will suggest the 
other. If there is no such connection as this, 
the two memory chains may remain for ever 
separate, despite the synchronism of their origin. 
If one wishes to find or recall any detail of 
material which is contained in one of these 
chains, it is necessary, as it were, to get hold of 
the end of the chain in which it is contained, 
and bring the whole chain into consciousness. 
The fact that on occasion we are unable to 



68 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

recall material which we are perfectly sure has 
been retained is due to simple inability to get 
hold of the correct chain, and this inability is 
often caused by the fact that failure to recall 
places us in an embarrassing or difficult situa- 
tion — and that our attention is directed chiefly 
toward the embarrassment. Take the not un- 
common case of suddenly finding oneself unable 
to recall the name of a person with whom one is 
well acquainted. The situation is embarrassing 
because the friend whose name is forgotten is 
apt to be somewhat displeased when he learns 
of the lapse of memory. If one in his search for 
the chain that contains the name goes carefully 
over the experiences shared with this friend, 
where he was first met, where he lives, his busi- 
ness, in general the details of his life as far as 
one knows them, there is a great probability that 
the name sought after will turn up. It is con- 
tained somewhere in that chain. But often, in- 
stead of pursuing some such systematic search, 
one becomes so attentive to the humiliation or 
embarrassment of the situation that it is out of 
the question to lay hold of the correct memory 
chain. The young man who has forgotten the 



REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING 69 

name of the girl with whom he is dancing and 
who is trying desperately to remember it is 
really concerning himself chiefly with the situa- 
tion which is bound to occur when the young lady 
finds out that he does not know what her name 
is. He realizes that he will have to call her by 
some definite cognomen before long; he under- 
stands that she will probably be much displeased 
if she comes to realize his f orgetf ulness ; he sees 
more or less dire consequences following, and be- 
cause he is thinking along such lines, he is unable 
to locate her name, the name being contained in 
an entirely different memory chain. 

It sometimes becomes necessary to assist a 
person to remember materials which they have 
forgotten, or occasionally to prove to a person 
that they have not forgotten something which 
they claim they have. In such cases the proce- 
dure which is followed has for its purpose a sys- 
tematic search for memory chains. A list of 
words is prepared, being chosen in such a way 
that it covers a very wide field indeed, and the 
person is then asked to reply to each of these 
words as they are read to him with the first word 
which occurs. The length of time between the 



70 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

reading of the "stimulus word" and the giving 
of the i ' reaction word ' ' in reply is carefully mea- 
sured. It is soon established that for any par- 
ticular person there is a rather constant reac- 
tion-time. If he then be given a stimulus word 
which has a direct connection with the ma- 
terial which he is supposed to have concealed 
or forgotten, either one of two things may 
occur: the reaction word may be very signifi- 
cant in nature, or the reaction time may be ab- 
normally long. Occasionally both these results 
will appear. 

Some time ago the writer had the opportunity 
of interviewing a young girl who was brought 
to him by her mother. The girl, who was about 
fourteen or fifteen years of age, told a rather 
curious story. She was employed by a large 
downtown store in one of the eastern American 
cities. Her work ordinarily ceased at six 
o'clock or thereabouts. On a particular night 
she left work at the regular time and, according 
to her story, proceeded directly home. The sig- 
nificant fact was that it was two o'clock in the 
morning when she arrived home. She claimed 
to be utterly unable to account for the length of 



REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING 71 

time it took for her to reach home. On her or- 
dinary route home she was forced to pass one 
of the large city parks situated in a somewhat 
outlying part of the city. She admitted, on 
questioning, that she had stepped into this park 
and sat down on a bench, but had stayed only a 
few minutes, and insisted that no one had spoken 
to her. At two o'clock she was found by her 
mother in a half -fainting condition on the front 
steps. 

The problem was to determine whether she 
was telling the truth, whether a period of am- 
nesia had actually intervened between six in the 
evening and two in the morning, or whether 
something had occurred which the girl was 
attempting to conceal. 

Simple questioning having failed completely, 
she was asked to submit to an association test. 
A long list of words was prepared and she was 
asked to respond to them one by one. She did 
this with a good grace and established a normal 
reaction time of approximately one and two- 
fifths seconds. Throughout the list of one hun- 
dred words to which she responded there was 
only one unusual association, that was to the 



72 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

word " floor, " to which she responded after 
eleven seconds with the word "dance." The in- 
vestigation was interrupted more or less rudely 
at this point partly by the girl declining to go 
any further, and partly by the fact that her 
mother decided that the investigation was futile. 
The probability was that the answer to the prob- 
lem would have been found to be somewhere con- 
nected with the only too obviously associated 
words "dance" and "floor." 

A very interesting example of the efficacy of 
this method of determining the presence of mem- 
ory material which a person has claimed to have 
forgotten is to be found in the following incident. 
In the fall of 1909 there was admitted to the 
Danvers (Mass.) State Hospital a young man 
of twentjr-one who, according to the physicians ' 
certificate was an epileptic, who had had on sev- 
eral occasions periods of amnesia, and who, ap- 
parently in an epileptic twilight condition, — 
aggravated by alcoholic excess, — had committed 
robbery. The youth, in a somewhat intoxicated 
condition, had entered a grocery store kept by 
an old man, and, after staying until the store 
closed, insisted on accompanying the old man 



REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING 73 

some distance along the street. Then in a quiet 
part of town he had turned upon the groceryman, 
knocked him down and robbed him of two dol- 
lars. Because of his age the old man's injuries 
proved quite severe. The youth was soon after 
arrested, but managed to convince the court that 
he had complete amnesia for all the events of 
the evening in question. He was then committed 
to Danvers. 

At Danvers the youth came under the atten- 
tion of the Assistant Physician who came to 
doubt the fact of his amnesia, and decided to 
submit him to an association test. The results 
of this test are of sufficient interest to quote. 

' ' The first six words were of indifferent char- 
acter and were within the limit of normal asso- 
ciation time. The first test word having some 
connection with the crime was the word 'gro- 
cery. ' The time of association was immediately 
doubled and the association words were 'you 
said grocery? — fire.' The association for the 
test words 'old man' was somewhat retarded — 
five seconds — and was insignificant. The next 
five indifferent words showed the normal asso- 
ciation time of three seconds. To the next test 



74 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

word, * murder,' the time of association was 
shorter than his usual time of reaction, and the 
word 'help' was given with a sharp intonation, 
as though he were in reality calling for help. To 
the word ' liquor' the association time was nor- 
mal, the association word being 'fire.' To the 
word ' memory,' after twenty- two seconds, he 
answered ' house.' Four indifferent words fol- 
lowed with a somewhat increased time reaction. 
To the test words 'robber' and 'dollar bill' the 
time was fairly normal and the association words 
insignificant. To the test word 'imagination' 
after five seconds, he gave the word 'water.' The 
association to 'insane' and 'guilty' was 'no, sir.' 
... To the name of the assailed man the asso- 
ciation time was two seconds and the association 
word was the man's Christian name. To the 
sharply spoken name of the street where the as- 
sault happened, the association time was ex- 
tremely short, for him, being hardly one second, 
'yes sir'. ... To the word 'blow' after three 
seconds, 'with the right hand.' To the word 
'fake' after fourteen seconds, 'time.' 

"After ten minutes I repeated the same test 
words, having in the meantime made no refer- 



REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING 75 

ence whatever in our conversation to my sus- 
picion regarding his simulation. . . . During 
this ten minutes' time the patient smiled often, 
seemed to be thinking hard and acted as though 
he were feeling quite uncomfortable, without, 
however, making any comments. To the first 
test word given him, 'grocery' he reacted after 
eight seconds, with the word 'time.' To the 
word 'murder,' up to nine seconds, 'no, sir.' To 
the word 'memory' after three seconds, again, 
'Yes, sir.' To 'dollar bill,' after two seconds, 
'memory.' To 'King Street,' after eleven sec- 
onds, 'Gt ' (name of the town). To 'left 

temple,' after eight seconds, 'bottle.' To 'blow,' 
after two seconds, the words 'no, sir.' " * 

The experiment proved to the physician that 
the culprit showed no signs whatever of amnesia, 
and he was accused of having simulated his f or- 
getfulness entirely. He finally answered, "I 
admit I faked from the beginning." His case 
came on trial soon after, and he was committed 
to the Concord Reformatory on an indefinite 
sentence. 

i Katzen-Ellenbogen, E. W., "The Detection of a Case of 
Simulation of Insanity by Means of Association Tests," Jour. 
of Abnormal Psych., Vol. VT, 1911-1912, p. 19. 



76 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

There is a third part of the memory process. 
It is not sufficient for an experience to be re- 
tained and recalled. It must also be recognized 
as a memory experience. It is perfectly possible 
for material to be recalled and not recognized, 
that is to say, for a memory image to mas- 
querade as a totally new idea. It probably hap- 
pens fairly often that an ambitious young author 
will mistake a memory of a story read long be- 
fore for an original plot, and he may even go 
so far as to use it as an original production. 
Perhaps it would not be too much to say that 
most so-called "plagiarism" is of this order. 
The writer knows of a particular case in which 
a man working in the graduate school of a uni- 
versity upon his thesis for the doctorate, actu- 
ally reproduced several pages almost verbatim 
of a thesis by another man already published 
upon a very similar topic. This was done with 
complete lack of recognition of the fact that 
such pages were really quotations and not orig- 
inal work at all. In fact, the man who did this 
was only too glad to recognize his error when it 
was brought to his attention. 

It is also possible for recognition to occur 



REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING 77 

without recall. In other words, a person may 
remember something which has not happened. 
A study of testimony on the witness stand will 
furnish many examples of this. People are will- 
ing in all sincerity to swear to having witnessed 
events which not only did not occur but which, 
in the nature of the case, may have been im- 
possible. Such testimony is made under oath, 
but there is no doubt that people making it may 
be sincere. 

When we pass on to a more practical aspect 
of the question of memory, we find that there are 
two or three" rather important laws which apply 
to the process of memorization. These may be 
best discussed under four heads. 

First : to memorize material it ordinarily helps 
very much if the material be thoroughly under- 
stood. If it is analyzed, arranged in systematic 
form, that in itself may produce a rather per- 
sistent effect upon memory. A man may adopt 
a system of mental "filing," and material 
which can be completely analyzed is, by the act 
of analysis, readily "filed" in the mental filing 
cases. But please notice that it is the fact of 
making the analysis which is of importance. The 



78 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

memorizing of the material after it is analyzed 
helps less and requires far more endeavor. A 
very brilliant young man who attended one of 
our Northern universities some dozen years ago 
is remembered by his class mates, among other 
things, for his industry and power of analysis. 
The writer remembers particularly a huge out- 
line which this young man made of the classifi- 
cation of coal-tar derivaties. This chart was 
drawn upon a large sheet of paper made by 
pasting together half a dozen sheets of ordinary 
drawing paper. The surface of this immense 
sheet was completely covered with fine writing, 
the whole thing being very carefully analyzed 
and systematically arranged. In the making of 
this outline its author impressed the material 
which it contained upon his memory, and it goes 
without saying that he took a high mark in that 
particular study. It happened, unfortunately, 
that his younger brother inherited this chart. 
For him the situation was different from that 
which the older brother had faced. He had no 
analysis to make. He had simply a great deal 
of memorization to do. Though he labored at 
this task very hard the result was not startlingly 



REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING 79 

successful, for in spite of the possession of high 
ability he did not take a good mark in this sub- 
ject at all. 

In the second place, even after a thorough ana- 
lyzing of material into its component parts, there 
is apt to be a certain amount of routine memoriz- 
ing necessary in practically all subjects. Eou- 
tine memory is memory by main force, and its 
success rests primarily upon repetition. Other 
things being equal, the more often material is 
repeated the better it will be remembered. It 
pays to spread such repetitions over several 
days ; that is, if one is to make a score of repeti- 
tions, it is better to make ten repetitions on two 
succeeding days than twenty repetitions on one 
day. Further, it is well that the material should 
be learned in rather large quantities, or units. 
By learning long units at once correct associa- 
tions are formed, and the whole learning proc- 
ess seems to take place with greater economy 
of effort and time than if the units used were 
smaller. If the material to be learned be cast 
into rhythmic form, the effect is beneficial, and 
rapid repetitions are, on the whole, better than 
slow ones. 



80 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

Third: the problem of memorizing material 
depends very much upon the feeling tone which 
is present at the time of the memorization or at 
the time at which the facts to be memorized 
occur. It may be stated as a general rule that 
anything very pleasant or very unpleasant is 
almost sure to be memorized. If one glances 
back over his life he will find that those facts 
which most readily recur to memory, the moun- 
tain tops of experience, as it were, are all, with- 
out exception, connected with emotional experi- 
ence of one kind or another. On the other hand, 
any material which is approached with a feeling 
of ennui is almost incapable of being memorized ; 
it is necessary to have some sort of feeling or 
emotion about it. Of course it is most advanta- 
geous for a student to really enjoy the subject- 
matter concerned, but it is probably good psy- 
chology for a teacher, if he is unable to make 
certain material pleasant for his pupils, to make 
it as unpleasant as possible ; anything is better 
than that it be perfectly colorless. 

In the fourth place, a few practical hints re- 
garding the actual memory process are in order. 



REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING 81 

Other things being equal, memorization is aid- 
ed by: 

A. Visualization. It seems to be true of the 
majority of people that they think in terms of 
visual imagery more often than in any other 
sense mode. For such people, material which 
has to be memorized should be arranged in the 
form of mental pictures if* possible. It is prob- 
ably definitely established that if facts are once 
pictured, clearly visualized with some detail, 
they are apt to stick in the memory thereafter. 
Therefore, it pays to spend a little time upon ar- 
rangement of the details of this visual image 
or mental picture. Perhaps it goes without 
saying that certain kinds of material lend them- 
selves to treatment of this kind more readily 
than other kinds. The remembering of faces 
and the names attaching to them, the remember- 
ing of the names or contents of books, or para- 
graphs, or verses, all these are readily visual- 
ized. Foreign language paradigms, mathemati- 
cal or chemical formulas, bare dates in history, 
are not so easily visualized. They must be 
clothed with some kind of illustrative matter 
before one can remember them in this way. 



82 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

B. Exaggeration. Exaggeration, even to the 
point of caricature, is a great aid to the memory 
process. The asymmetrical enlargement of one 
detail, for instance, of an incident in a certain 
person's past, of one of the same person's char- 
acteristics, a trick of speech or walking, an in- 
dividual way of swinging the hands or handling 
a pen, a peculiarity of facial or bodily structure 
will enable one to remember that person easily. 

C. Association. The reference here is to 
carefully, even laboriously constructed, systems 
of association, especially unusual associations. 
One may have to go all round Robin Hood's barn 
to create an association, but it is worth while to 
do so, because it usually means that the material 
so associated will stick in memory thenceforth, 
and remain accessible when needed. 

The commercial methods for improving mem- 
ory so widely advertised to-day consist largely 
in filing and recording methods. In practically 
every case there is some elaborate outline or 
skeleton which must be memorized. This out- 
line once memorized, associations are established 
with material which one wishes to retain, and in 
this way such material is filed in memory in the 



REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING 83 

order determined by the outline. Beyond doubt, 
some value attaches to certain of these systems, 
and any person who is troubled with an embar- 
rassing degree of inability to remember may find 
that it is worth the trouble involved to procure 
and master one of these methods. 

The subject of memory is not completed with- 
out a reference to the facts of forgetting. There 
are fundamentally two forms of forgetting. 
There is a form which may be understood as 
analogous to natural decay. Material simply 
passes from memory in a way similar to that in 
which organic matter in time crumbles to dust. 
But this analogy can't be carried too far. Jn 
the case of memory, decay is extremely rapid 
at first, as much as from sixty to eighty per 
cent of certain forms of memory material being 
capable of being lost in the first twenty-four 
hours. But the rate of decay becomes progres- 
sively slower, and even after very long periods 
of time a certain proportion of anything which 
has once been memorized may be shown to be 
still present. 

The second form of forgetting is of an en- 
tirely different type and is based upon entirely 



84 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

different principles. It is pathological in nature, 
and in its extreme forms is known by the name 
of "amnesia. 7 ' In these more serious forms, 
pathological forgetting becomes a complete dis- 
appearance of whole chains of memory. Again 
it must be emphasized that our memories are 
not complete cross-sections of our lives. They 
occur in chains, in groups. One of these groups, 
for reasons which are not well understood, may 
entirely drop out. A person may lose all mem- 
ory of his experiences with certain people or 
certain events. It does not often happen that 
amnesia is complete, that a person who suffers 
from an attack of pathological f orgetfulness for- 
gets everything. He forgets some things only, 
usually something which it is of extreme im- 
portance for him to remember, though not quite 
so important as those things he does not forget. 
He may forget his own name, his wife 's name, or 
even the fact that he is married. He may not 
remember his profession, or his ambitions, but 
he will almost certainly remember his language 
and the methods of performing ordinary feats 
having to do with the tasks of daily life. He 
knows, in a word, how to dress himself, how to 



REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING 85 

handle a knife and fork, how to walk and speak. 
He knows that one pays to ride on a street car 
or a train. It is not a complete section gone out 
of the stream of memory, it is a disappearance of 
certain chains which wind in and out among the 
other chains of memory. 

In the early morning of a certain day in 
November, 1913, a certain gentleman who had 
occupied an important place in a prominent 
educational institution in New York found him- 
self on a train, and gradually awoke to the reali- 
zation that he had not the slightest idea where 
he was going, what he was going to do when he 
arrived at his destination, nor even what his 
name and profession were. These later he found 
out by examining letters in his pocket. These 
revealed his name, and the fact that he was evi- 
dently an assistant professor in Teachers' Col- 
lege, Columbia University. It also appeared 
that he was considering an offer from Ohio State 
University. Whether he had accepted this offer 
or not, he did not know. It was also easy for 
him to ascertain that the train on which he rode 
was en route to Detroit. The rest of his ante- 
cedents were completely missing. Arriving at 



86 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

Detroit he decided to take an electric car to 
Toledo. It is significant that he knew that To- 
ledo was within easy reach of Detroit. From 
Toledo he started ont walking, hoping that sev- 
eral days of this wonld restore his evanescent 
memory. He understood fairly well what was 
the matter with him. He knew what amnesia 
was, and felt certain that he was suffering from 
it. He was able to recall many facts from his 
retained store of knowledge, for instance the ap- 
pearance of Columbia University buildings, the 
view from Morningside Heights, and the appear- 
ance of the Bay of Naples and the Piazza San 
Marco in Venice. His image of the Acropolis 
was vague. Later he was to find out that he 
had never seen the Acropolis, having never been 
in Athens, and knew it only from pictures. In 
a similar way he was able to construct a lecture 
on the French Eevolution, without finding him- 
self at a loss for a single name or date. But of 
his own personal and professional past he could 
recall nothing. He convinced himself that he 
had had nothing to do with farming, even the 
harnessing of a horse was mysterious to him, nor 
with any manual labor. Yet circumstances, the 



REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING 87 

necessity of earning a living, forced him to 
plunge into the world of manual labor, and live 
by his hands and the sweat of his brow. His 
adventures were amazing, before the day came, 
over two years later, when, while engaged in 
scrubbing the floor of the dining-room of a hotel 
in Colorado Springs, recollection suddenly re- 
turned, not all at once, but enough to make cer- 
tain the complete recovery which soon followed. 2 

The interesting and characteristic thing about 
this example of amnesia is the way in which only 
certain chains of memory were lost. Much was 
forgotten, much remained. Why he should for- 
get his business relationships, but remember how 
to play chess, is completely inexplicable to mod- 
ern psychology. We do not yet know enough of 
the mechanism of memory to begin to explain 
how such things happen. 

The milder forms of pathological forgetful- 
ness are not unlike a slight degree of amnesia. 
But the distinction is not only, nor chiefly, one of 
degree. It lies in the nature of the material 
which disappears. It seems to be forgotten for 

sLavell, C. F., "The Man Who Lost Himself," Atlantic 
Monthly, Nov., 1917. 



88 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

a reason, there are more or less logical principles 
underlying this process of selective elimination. 
This form of forgetting may be termed "pur- 
posive forgetting." There are certain facts 
which it is unpleasant or inconvenient to remem- 
ber. They may have to do with an accijlentj a 
bad fright, or some catastrophic disturbance of 
the emotional life. Under certain conditions, 
not entirely unconnected with other kinds of 
mental disturbance, such facts may disappear 
from memory. A certain color, a certain tone, 
a person having certain physical characteristics 
may produce emotional upheaval in a particular 
man, though he does not know why. The reason 
lies ordinarily in some past experience connected 
with a fact of the same kind as that which dis- 
turbs him. But there is no recollection of this 
past experience. One may forget the name of a 
person who bores or irritates him. A task which 
is unpleasant or monotonous, without being ex- 
cessively so, is apt to be forgotten. One may for- 
get to attend a boresome committee meeting, but 
one is less likely to forget an appointment with 
the dentist. It has been said that the reason the 
proverbial husband forgets to mail his wife's 



REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING 89 

letters is that in his heart he does not feel that 
it makes a great deal of difference whether they 
are mailed promptly or not. 

Much more might be written about memory, 
but this is not the place to enlarge further on the 
subject. Memory is really the center of person- 
ality, and if its processes are ever reduced to 
exact laws, we will be in a fair way to under- 
stand the nature of personality itself. 



CHAPTER FIVE 

ATTENTION - AND INTEREST 

THE human organism is a selective mecha- 
nism of no mean efficiency by virtne of the 
sensory apparatus with which it is equipped. 
The surface of the body and some areas of the 
organism not on the surface are thickly im- 
planted with small cells of highly specialized 
form, having the function of responding in in- 
dividual ways when they are affected by particu- 
lar forms of physical or chemical activity. Into 
a description of the mechanism whereby this 
is accomplished there is no time to go here. 
The point to be emphasized in this connection 
is that each variety of these so-cajled " re- 
ceptors'' is capable of being actuated only by 
very definite forms of physical or chemical 
force. There are certain forms of sensory re- 
ceptive cells which respond when they are 
touched by ether waves vibrating at rates vary- 
ing from about four hundred and fifty billion per 

90 



ATTENTION AND INTEREST 01 

second to abont seven hundred and ninety bil- 
lion per second. These are the rods and cones 
of the retina. Furthermore, there is some evi- 
dence that particular wave lengths stimulate cer- 
tain of these receptors and other wave lengths 
certain others. The receptors for hearing are 
set into operation when they are stimulated by 
air waves of not less than sixteen per second 
and not greater than twenty thousand per second 
at the most. There are some cells which are 
actuated by temperatures under blood heat, and 
others which are actuated by temperatures 
which are at least a degree or two above blood 
heat. Certain receptors for taste are actuated 
by acids, others by sweet solutions, by salt or 
bitter solutions. It is probable that there are 
several varieties of receptors for smell, and that 
the gas that actuates one will not actuate the 
others. 

There are many physical disturbances, how- 
ever, which actuate no receptors, and of which 
we remain forever directly unconscious. We 
have, for instance, no direct conscious appre- 
hension of X-rays, nor of the various radio- 
active emanations. We have no receptive organs 



92 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DUOK 

for these, and they simply pass us by. We know 
of their existence only by roundabout methods 
of calculation. 

Not only is the animal organism a selective 
apparatus in the sense I have suggested, but 
from another standpoint also it may be seen to 
be selective in its function. Among the particu- 
lar forms of experience which various forms of 
stimulus may offer us, we are able to pick and 
choose. "We are not conscious at any time of 
everything of which, theoretically, we might be 
conscious. Everything that falls within our 
visual field is not seen, nor is everything audible 
at a certain moment heard. The man who 
stands beside me may see a different group of 
objects or hear a different sort of sound from 
that which I see or hear. In fact, the man who 
stands beside me, no matter how close, and my- 
self, must receive different groups of sensory 
experiences. 

The fact of enforced interest is known as 
"attention." Primarily, attention is selection. 
There is so much going on, "the world is so full 
of a number of things," that it is impossible for 
the quickest one among us to take cognizance of 



ATTENTION AND INTEREST 03 

them all. And the selection which different 
people make among possible objects of which 
they might be conscious differs with the person. 
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the 
principles which determine of just what objects 
we shall be conscious. Why do I attend to a 
certain class of objects, and the man beside me 
to an entirely different class f Why do I, when 
I visit an art gallery or a museum, see one thing 
and my comrade another f Why am I impressed 
by certain faces, while my friend fails to notice 
them at all ? Why, in a word, is my world differ- 
ent not only from my neighbor's but from the 
world in which everyone else lives? For, in a 
certain sense, it is true that each of us lives to 
himself alone, and that we see and hear and 
appreciate and value differently. We hate and 
love different things, we attend to different 
things. 

Before attempting any description of the fac- 
tors controlling attention, it is necessary to refer 
to certain motor phenomena which are the very 
essence of the attentive process itself. There 
are three forms of motor adjustment which con- 
stitute the movement side of the attention proc- 



94 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

ess. First of all, there is adjustment of the par- 
ticular sense organs concerned when one desires 
to attend a particular object, or when factors 
in an object compel attention. If it be a matter 
of visual attention, the eyes will converge upon 
the object, if it be not too distant, and the lens 
will accommodate, that is to say, will increase or 
decrease appropriately its normal focal length. 
If it is a matter of auditory attention, in the 
case of animals having mobile ears, the pinnae of 
the ears will turn toward the source of sound. 
If, as in the case of man, the ears themselves 
cannot be independently moved, the head will be 
turned so that the sound waves will impress the 
ears most strongly. If it is a matter of smell, 
one instinctively sniffs, inhales strongly an<3 
suddenly so as to force the gas over the olfactory 
surfaces. If a matter of taste the substance is 
thoroughly dissolved in the saliva, and allowed 
to wet the tongue, the inside o,f the cheeks, and, 
to some extent, the lips. 

In the second place there is a general tensing 
of muscle. A person who is attending to any one 
thing very intently is in a state of more or less 
general rigidity. If a wild animal, to whom 



ATTENTION AND INTEREST 95 

your presence is unknown, trots through a forest 
glade in front of you and you whistle sharply to 
it, it may stop dead for an instant. If one were 
able to examine it at this moment, it probably 
would be found that its muscles are all tensed. 
The person who is startled by some real or 
fancied noise or object, and who, therefore, is 
attending very carefully indeed, contracts near- 
ly all the voluntary muscles. The resulting 
rigidity constitutes the third motor phenomenon 
connected with attention, cessation of general 
movement. The startled person or wild animal 
stops dead for a very brief instant. Of the same 
order as this momentary cessation is the death 
feint of the opossum or the fox. The opossum 
"playing dead" is, of course, not deliberately 
acting or playing a game. He is simply too 
frightened to move. And among human beings 
the toll of death each year from automobiles and 
street cars is increased very much by this in- 
stinctive stopping of all movement when one is 
startled. 

A person who wishes to see very distinctly, or 
to hear unusually clearly, will stop to do so. 
Each one of us has seen the careful cook while 



96 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

tasting some more or less satisfactory concoc- 
tion stand still in the middle of the room to do it. 
The factors which determine the particular 
objects to which an individual will pay attention 
are of two kinds. First, those which, for want 
of a better name, may be called the objective 
factors. These are conditions imposed by ex- 
ternal circumstances. The first of these is the 
absolute physical intensity of the stimulus. 
Other things being equal, the brightest light, the 
loudest noise, the sharpest pain, will be attended 
to. But an even more important condition is the 
matter of variation in intensity. A stimulus 
which varies in intensity, and, to some extent, 
which varies in quality, will attract attention 
even to the neglect of more intense, but unvary- 
ing, stimuli. The shooting pain or the flashing 
light or the sound that becomes louder and more 
distinct, then dies away, will enforce attention. 
The fire engines of New York City and of some 
other large cities, carry siren whistles. These 
sirens, while not particularly loud, can be heard 
clearly and distinctly above the rattle and roar 
of commerce at the corner of Broadway and 
Forty- second Street. It is true that in this par- 



ATTENTION AND INTEREST 97 

ticular case another principle is involved besides 
that of intensity, the matter of the meaning of 
the fire siren. The writer dwelt in a New Eng- 
land mill city for some years. Each mill in 
that city blew its morning whistle at the un- 
pleasantly early hour of six. One of these whis- 
tles was a siren and though not londer than 
the others, could be easily distinguished from its 
dozen or more rivals. 

To some extent the specific quality of the stim- 
ulus will enforce attention. Certain colors are 
a little more capable of demanding attention than 
others — reds and yellows rather more than the 
greens or blues. But this fact may be, at base, 
a matter of the physical intensity of the stimuli, 
and there are, beyond doubt, individual differ- 
ences involved here. 

If the foregoing list of factors controlling at- 
tention constituted a complete list it would mean 
that attention is an entirely mechanical process. 
If objective principles alone are concerned, man 
must be considered an automaton and nothing 
more, at least in so far as his attention is con- 
cerned. There are, however, other factors of a 
different nature which are intimately concerned 



98 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

with the selection of the objects to which we may 
attend. These principles are not concerned with 
the physical nature of the stimulus so much as 
with our past experiences with similar forms of 
stimuli. These subjective factors, to give them 
a name, depend upon experience and the effect 
which experience has produced upon our mech- 
anism. One might, perhaps, sum up the situa- 
tion by saying that the objective factors are 
concerned with the effect of the immediately 
present environment upon an inherited nervous 
system, and the subjective factors with the 
effect of past experience upon the same nervous 
system. 

Any idea which has been dominantly in mind 
will determine the objects to which we pay at- 
tention. Our previous mental activities give a 
certain direction not only to thought but to sense 
perception. Mental activities acquire a kind of 
impetus which has power to admit to conscious- 
ness or banish from consciousness objects which 
are, respectively, either similar to or different 
from them. For example, let us suppose two 
people have lost quite different objects of value 
in about the same locality; one has lost a bank 



ATTENTION AND INTEREST 99 

bill, the other a bit of jewelry. Let those two 
people search over the same ground for their 
lost property, and then have them compare 
notes. Yon will find that one of them has seen 
objects which nearly or remotely resembled a 
crumpled bank bill ; bits of dirty paper, or rolled 
up leaves. The other person has noticed every 
bit of broken glass, every sparkling dew-drop, 
anything which even by exaggeration could re- 
semble a piece of jewelry. And the two may 
wholly disagree as to the actual existence of the 
objects which the other claims to have seen. Or 
watch a group of men who have been differently 
trained go through the same bit of wild country. 
One man, trained as a geologist, will see every- 
thing appertaining to his science — evidences of 
mineral deposits, or outcroppings of various 
generations of strata. The hunter will see marks 
betokening the fact that various kinds of game 
have been present lately. He will notice the 
presence or absence of the food material of the 
game he is seeking, pick up every evidence of a 
trail, and may completely miss the geological 
facts, so obvious to the first man. And if we 
suppose a third man to be an artist, he will not 



100 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

see the objects which are so clear to his com- 
panions but will discover an entirely different 
group of his own. He is interested in color, in 
line and curve, and may see only these. The 
three men on returning will describe entirely 
different countries, and if they write of what 
they have seen and where they have been, 
nothing in their accounts other than the geo- 
graphical names might coincide. 

It is a development of the above, and not a 
new principle, which states that ideals, ambi- 
tions and education determine our selection 
of objects of attention. The boy who is extremely 
interested in becoming a surgeon will be at- 
tracted by certain kinds of things which his com- 
panion, interested only in mechanics, may not 
see at all, or if he sees will see imperfectly. It 
is not an exaggeration to say that because the 
past experiences of individuals have been differ- 
ent, these individuals will actually live in worlds 
of their own. One will see objects not present 
to another; an expert may clearly see details 
which he is unable to point out to another even 
when the other man tries hard to see them. 

There is a third factor concerned in this con- 



ATTENTION AND INTEREST 101 

nection, which cannot be accurately called either 
objective or subjective, — the fact of heredity. 
Obviously, different kinds of animals pick out 
different things in which to be interested ; com- 
pare, for example, the interests of carnivorous 
and herbivorous animals. And it is probably 
true, although it may be the part of wisdom not 
to make too definite a statement, that in this re- 
gard two animals of the same species may be 
differently endowed; it may be easier for one 
of two men to get mechanical details than it is 
for another, though both have had the same 
training. One man may observe with ease re- 
lations and effects such as the heart of the mu- 
sician or artist delights in ; to another man these 
may simply be non-existent. 

It must be understood that all the factors men- 
tioned in this chapter work together. No one of 
them operates by itself. Together these factors 
constitute a rather involved series of controls, 
and while it is not overly difficult to state such 
a list of controls, it is difficult, if not impos- 
sible, in the case of an individual paying atten- 
tion to certain objects, to say just why he selects 
those objects. To do so would require super- 



102 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

human knowledge both of his neuromuscular 
mechanism and of his past experiences and 
activities. 

The term " interest' ' is usually applied to 
involuntary attention. We have an interest in 
an object, if, when it be present, it forces itself 
into consciousness. Two or three points are 
worth remarking in this connection. In the first 
place it is to be remembered, as mentioned in the 
last chapter, that extreme pleasantness or un- 
pleasantness connected with an object make it 
necessary for us to attend to it. Just what it is 
that makes an object pleasant or unpleasant is 
another matter, and should not be discussed 
here. Then again, any objects or facts which 
are instinctive in their nature or appeal, attain 
great selective power in this way. 

Voluntary attention or forced concentration is 
a matter of great importance to students, and, 
indeed, to all men. A teacher is very frequently 
asked to state methods whereby a student may 
"learn to concentrate. " The question is not 
obviously absurd, but to answer it satisfactorily 
is all but impossible. In a measure it is like 
being asked how one can acquire common sense. 



ATTENTION AND INTEREST 103 

Certain conditions may make attention some- 
what easier to control than it otherwise would be. 
As has been said in the chapter on Habits of 
Study, the proper arrangement of surroundings 
is important. Persistent and repeated attempts 
to get the difficult material is perhaps the secret 
of mental concentration. It probably does not lie 
within the power of anyone to remain steadily at 
a very difficult task for a very long period of 
time. It does, however t lie within the power of 
everyone to return to that same task again and 
again. This repeated attack upon a problem or 
subject accomplishes in -the long run the same 
effect as a persistent keeping at the task, and is 
very much easier. 

There are certain incidental helps, the use 
of which may be more valuable to some people 
than to others. It happens not seldom that 
reading aloud will impress the material read, 
also the taking of notes in the manner suggested 
in an earlier chapter. It has, been found of help, 
in the case of some students, to suggest that they 
shorten the length of their study time, the point 
being that the knowledge that the end of the 
study period is set at a certain period not 



104 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

too far distant, will increase the intensity of 
study while it is in progress. And again, with 
many subjects, it is of very great importance 
indeed that the student set himself definite ques- 
tions which he is to answer in that evening's 
reading, thus organizing and directing his at- 
tention. 

It is helpful to remember that all elementary 
material is difficult to learn, or, more accurately, 
must be learned by the most difficult method, 
that of rote memorization. All subjects get 
easier as one progresses with them. One of the 
delights of advanced study in any line is the in- 
creasing mastery which the student obtains over 
the subject-matter. The student should under- 
stand that the material which to-day he reads 
with difficulty, if he can read it at all, will some 
day become easy. The problems insoluble, per- 
haps unintelligible to him at present, will some 
day be answered in a routine way. The power 
of concentration increases with practice if one 
is honest in his attempts. 



CHAPTER SIX 



HOW WE REASON 



IT has been said that no animals and few men 
reason. This statement is not purely ironic, 
but implies a very real truth about certain forms 
of mental process. The complex organism, such 
as is found in orders of mammals or birds or 
even in animals somewhat lower in the scale, is 
capable of extricating itself from certain kinds 
of predicaments, not, be it remembered, from 
all. There are several ways in which an animal 
may extricate itself from a predicament, or, 
to use another phrase with the same meaning, 
can solve a problem. An animal, by using its 
various kinds of behavior forcefully and per- 
sistently, may strike upon the solution of its 
problem by pure accident. It may simply worry 
its way out of a trap, with no idea guiding it at 
all. If the problem is one of a certain number of 
groups of problems the complete activity neces- 
sary to solve it is already provided by nature, 

105 



106 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

which is to say that the problem may be solved by 
instinct. For instance, the nest-bnilding instinct 
in birds solves a very intricate problem in a 
very beautiful manner. Again, a problem may 
be solved by memory, or by imitation. Perhaps 
the animal was in a similar situation before, and 
solved it on that occasion instinctively or acci- 
dentally, and on the second occasion simply re- 
members how it acted on the previous occasion. 
But now and then problems occur which can 
neither be solved accidentally nor by instinct 
nor by memory. For animals such problems 
are usually insolvable but a certain small pro- 
portion of them, when they occur to human be- 
ings, may be solved by reasoning. Seasoning 
is then a method of solving problems, though all 
problem solving is not reasoning. 

It is only a minority of problems to which a 
reasoning solution possibly applies. And, in the 
very nature of things, many problems are in- 
soluble. The reasoning process is not, of course, 
a method of solving insoluble problems, it is 
only a method of attacking certain forms of 
complex situations in which human beings are 
placed. The ability to use this method is found 



HOW WE REASON 107 

only in human beings, practically never in the 
lower animals. All human beings are not capa- 
ble of using, or, at least, do not use this method. 
And no human being uses it exclusively nor even 
very often. 

A situation may be difficult, it may be heart- 
rending and intensely tragic, and yet in no sense 
be a problem, for the simple reason that there 
is nothing to be done about it. A situation which 
is uneseapable, inevitable, is not problematic in 
its nature. Nor can a situation be correctly 
termed a problem when there is a perfectly ob- 
vious method of handling it. It becomes a prob- 
lem when there are two or more possible 
methods of handling it and there is a question 
as to which is the more economical or available 
of the two. Problems, therefore, involve choice. 
Where there is no choice, there is no problem. 
Sorrow, remorse, anger, in themselves do not 
constitute problems. 

The problem consists essentially of two strong 
impulses, desires or possibilities which contra- 
dict each other by their very nature. It is, as 
it were, a wall with a road across. A deep in- 
stinctive or acquired impulse may urge a man to 



108 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

go in one direction, to do one kind of thing. 
Another impulse, equally forceful, impels him 
in another direction. These two forces cannot 
both work out, and the problem is thereby con- 
stituted. How are you going to do two con- 
tradictory things at once ? Can you attain the 
two goals? Is there any possible third way? 

Further, it is in the essence of the problem 
that it is imposed upon us from without. Prob- 
lems are not artificial, they are natural ; they are 
not deliberately created by men themselves, they 
are forced upon men by forces and circumstances 
outside human control. Like the lions in Chris- 
tian's path, they are terrible and menacing 
situations which cannot be avoided, but must be 
faced and baffled or arranged in some way or 
other. 

There are three parts to the application of the 
reasoning process to a problem : it is first neces- 
sary that the problem be correctly compre- 
hended, second, it must be analyzed ; that is, its 
most significant feature determined, and the 
appropriate activity at one's command must 
then be selected. 

To comprehend a problem is to understand 



HOW WE REASON 109 

just wherein its difficult features lie. It often 
happens that this part of the reasoning process 
is all that is necessary, and if one becomes 
perfectly sure exactly what his problem is, the 
problem itself will vanish, or an obvious solu- 
tion will suggest itself. Beyond all doubt there 
are problems which continue to threaten and dis- 
hearten certain individuals because they have 
never taken the pains to understand exactly what 
the problem is. A situation may be difficult, one 
may be perfectly aware of its terror or its ardu- 
ousness and yet make no attempt, properly so- 
called, to understand it. So some men simply 
surrender to life, and stand with their hands in 
the air in the face of difficulties. To solve a 
problem, therefore, it is necessary first of all to 
understand it. 

It is easy enough to say that one must come 
to understand a problem. But how can one 
understand, how does one arrive at comprehen- 
sion? It is all but impossible to give directions. 
All that can here be said is that the way to 
comprehend is to observe, carefully and sys- 
tematically. If one, as it were, sits down in 
front of a problem and studies it carefully and 



110 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

persistently, its essential nature and its com- 
ponent parts will gradually become more clear. 
It requires patient and orderly search, nor will 
these always be successful. It may also be 
necessary that previous knowledge of that type 
of problem be present, either in one's own 
experience or in available books. 

After the understanding of a problem comes 
the process of analyzing it, cutting it up into 
various parts, and arranging these in order so 
that they may be carefully examined separately. 
In this way the elements of the problem which 
are new to experience may be distinguished 
from those which are old. The old portions may 
then be stated in terms which are familiar to 
us. The whole arrangement and the total se- 
quence of events is subjected to careful exami- 
nation, and the reasoning process is already at 
work. 

It lies in the nature of most, if not all, prob- 
lems, that at any particular moment there is a 
particular detail of the problem which, for the 
moment, represents the total problem. Unless 
the problem is comprehended in its details as 
well as in its totality it will be impossible to 



HOW WE REASON 111 

say wherein this vital center, this strategic point 
for attack, lies. Here we have the real reason 
for the analysis. It is to determine where the 
problem should be attacked. It is also true that 
this vital center of the problem varies from mo- 
ment to moment, and it is necessary, if the solu- 
tion is to be gained, that the method of the 
attack vary as the vital point varies. This dis- 
tinguishing of the vital center is the second step 
in the solution of the problem. 

The third step in obtaining a solution of a 
problem is the selection of the appropriate ac- 
tion to use in view of one's decision regarding 
its vital center. Of course, there may not be 
any activity at one's command which is appro- 
priate. In such a case the problem is insoluble. 
But it often happens that by past experience, 
by reading, or in some other manner, one has 
acquired some form of active adaptation which 
will apply to this case. When that is so, the 
appropriate activity must be found and put to 
work on the problem. 

Two kinds of training or of ability are of 
importance here. There is the acquisition of a 
very great many possible activities, the gather- 



112 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

ing together of many bits of knowledge. The 
magnitude of information at one 's command will, 
in many cases, permit the solution of otherwise 
insoluble problems. The person who is particu- 
larly eminent in the possession of information 
is the learned man, the man of understanding. 
It is possible, however, that the learned man may 
not be able in a particular case to determine just 
exactly which of his many possible ways of at- 
tacking the problem is the best way. And his 
choice may prove amazingly futile on occasion. 

There is another factor which has to do the 
choosing of the particular activity with which to 
attack the problem. The possession of this abil- 
ity is popularly known as "judgment," and 
sometimes makes up for a great lack in infor- 
mation. The man possessing judgment is the 
clever, the judicious or the practical man. 
Learning and judgment may or may not exist 
at once in the same man. When they do co- 
exist in the same man we find real wisdom. 

These steps in the reasoning process may be 
indistinguishable in a particular problem, but, 
for all that, are present and may, in most cases, 
be discovered by careful analysis. 



HOW WE REASON 113 

Examples of the possession of learning with- 
out judgment will occur easily to the reader. The 
absent-minded savant of the comic-paper type, 
the widely informed theoretician in the presence 
of an intensely practical situation, illustrate the 
man who having many possible forms of activity 
at his disposal is unable to choose one of them 
to solve an actual problem. Examples of the 
possession of judgment "without learning are also 
not infrequent. The following incident which 
came to the writer's attention lately illustrates 
the value of judgment coupled with only a small 
amount of learning. Two young men at work on 
a farm, one of them a college sophomore on his 
summer vacation, had trouble with their horses. 
One of the horses finally threw itself and became 
tangled in the harness. One of the brothers, a 
little excited, for the horse was being hurt, took 
out his knife, having a long sharp pointed blade, 
and, with a long sweeping stroke, attempted to 
cut the harness. In some way or other he drove 
the knife into his own arm, severing a large blood 
vessel. No help was at hand, no physician was 
within five miles, no auto or telephone was avail- 
able. But the uninjured brother, the sophomore, 



114 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

got the instruments which had belonged to his 
surgeon father, long dead, opened the wound, 
found the blood spurting with the beat of the 
heart, actually managed to catch hold of the 
heart end of the artery, to tie a silk thread 
around it, and thus to save his brother's life. 

A street car struck a bicyclist in a certain city 
some time ago. The motorman applied his 
brakes, but not quickly enough to save the bicy- 
clist. The car stopped so that the victim was 
wedged under it, still conscious. A crowd gath- 
ered almost instantaneously, thrilled with hor- 
ror by the really terrible circumstances, and ex- 
tremely anxious to do something to alleviate the 
sufferings of the unfortunate man. 

Here we have the problem unanalyzed. Every 
man in the Crowd was perfectly aware that there 
was a terrible situation facing him. He knew 
something must be done, but he did not know 
what to do, where to start. For the majority of 
men in that group the problem had no salient 
point, there was nothing to take hold of. There- 
fore, in this particular case, the crowd did sev- 
eral ridiculous things, as crowds in such circum- 
stances are apt to do. First of all, groups of 



HOW WE REASON 115 

men caught hold of the front and hack of the 
car and tried to lift it bodily. Their efforts re- 
sulted in failure because the body of the car 
was simply sprung up and down upon its trucks, 
which were immovable. Next, with almost un- 
believable stupidity, the crowd ran around the 
street car several times yelling at the tops of 
their voices. Then they stopped suddenly and 
ran around the car in the opposite direction. 
Very evidently there was no realization of any 
vital center of the whole situation. The problem 
was an unanalyzed and terrifying whole. 

Someone in the crowd finally analyzed the sit- 
uation sufficiently to realize that experts were 
necessary. He accordingly summoned doctors, 
an ambulance and the street railway wrecking 
crew; When these arrived the easy accuracy and 
nice detail of their movements proved perfectly 
that to them the problem was not a great big 
confusing whole, but a composition of small and 
attackable parts. The wrecking crew had one 
simple thing to do. It was to lift the car. This 
they had done dozens of times before. They had 
apparatus with them for lifting it, and speedily 
started to solve this part of the problem. This 



116 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

done, other details presented themselves to the 
crew, that is to say, the center of the problem 
changed as they succeeded in solving it. 

The physician when he arrived had a particu- 
lar definite thing to do. It may have been the 
administering of anaesthesia, the stopping of 
haemorrhage — whatever it was, it was definite 
and not general. The ability of the physician 
to solve his problem depended upon the pos- 
session of certain training and certain informa- 
tion. It also depended upon a certain skill in 
judgment. These two together constitute wis- 
dom. The success of the physician's attack upon 
his problem depended in part upon his wisdom, 
but not entirely, for the problem might have 
been insoluble for the wisest physician who ever 
lived. 

A fourth form of activity frequently forms 
part of the reasoning proces-s, that is "proof." 
The most convincing form of proof consists in 
putting the chosen activity to work upon Its 
problem. If it works, the problem is solved and 
the course of reasoning is justified. But in many 
cases this is impossible. It may be that the 
working out of the solution may extend through 



HOW WE REASON 117 

centuries of time, as in the case of an astronom- 
ical hypothesis. Here one must alter his meth- 
ods of proof, and substitute for the method men- 
tioned an examination of the chosen activity in 
the light of all one's other experiences, and of 
the experiences of all other men with whom one 
is familiar. We assume that all experience is 
consistent. If one finds that the activity he has 
selected is at variance with, is contradicted by 
some well-established fact or facts, that activity 
is incorrectly inferred. It has happened, and 
not seldom, in the history of science, that a very 
small fact has wrecked a promising theory. 



CHAPTER SEVEN 

THE EFFECTS OF EMOTION 

IT has been quite lately recognised that emo- 
tion plays a part in* the general activities of 
the body far more important than we had hither- 
to supposed. We have come to know that in their 
physiological effects emotion and fatigue are 
nearly identical. Understanding this fact it is 
at once obvious that the condition of a person 
chronically emotionally disturbed is not such as 
to make for a high quality or a large amount of 
productive labor. 

The psychology of emotion is rather a new 
subject, and we are beginning and only begin- 
ning to know anything about it. Perhaps the 
first hint of the new attitude toward emotion was 
given us by a Danish physiologist, C. Lange, in 
1887, and, at about the same time by Professor 
William James, then head of the department of 
Psychology in Harvard University. The state- 
ments of these men reversed the orthodox con- 

118 



THE EFFECTS OF EMOTION 119 

cept of the nature of emotion, and were to the 
effect that emotion was the result, rather than 
the cause, of physiological disturbances. They 
said that one feels anger because of a disturb- 
ance of the organism, chiefly of the viscera and 
the glandular system, accompanied by increased 
blood pressure, increased heart rate, vacillating 
and quickened respiration, and some loss of 
control over the skeletal muscles. "While such 
changes have always been recognized as occur- 
ring at the same time as emotion, the view before 
Lange and James had been that these move- 
ments were the effect of the psychic disturbance. 
Lange and James turned the matter around, and 
pointed out that the conditions could not only 
be explained, but could be better explained by 
considering that the conscious experience of 
emotion was a result of the bodily movements 
and not the cause. 

It is probably a long step from the James- 
Lange theory of emotion to our present day the- 
ories about it, but James and Lange undoubtedly 
took the first step in the direction along which 
modern physiologists and psychologists are 
traveling. 



120 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

*A recent writer gives us the following defini- 
tion of emotion: "An emotion is an inherent 
* pattern reaction,' involving profound changes 
of the bodily mechanism as a whole, but particu- 
larly of the visceral and glandular systems. By 
pattern reaction we mean that the separate de- 
tails of response appear with some constancy, 
with some regularity and in approximately the 
same sequential order each time the exciting 
stimulus is presented. It is obvious that if this 
formulation is to fit the facts, the general con- 
dition of the organism must be such that the 
stimulus can produce its effect. A child alone 
in a house on a stormy night with only a dim 
candle burning may display the reaction of fear 
at the mournful hoot of an owl. If the parents 
are at hand and the room is well lighted, the 
stimulus may pass unreacted to. Stimulus, then, 
in this sense, is used in a broad way to refer not 
only to the exciting object but also to the gen- 
eral setting. There is implied also the fact that 
the general state of the organism must be sensi- 
tive to this form of stimulus at the moment. 
This condition is very important. . . . When 
the naturalist comes suddenly upon a young 



THE EFFECTS OF EMOTION 121 

sooty tern under four days of age, it lies stock 
still (it is capable of very rapid locomotion) : 
It can be pushed about or rolled over without 
explicit forms of response appearing. The 
moment the intruder moves away, the fledgling 
may hop to its feet and dash away or give one 
of its instinctive cries. The pattern-reaction, 
that is ; the explicit observable pattern, is very 
simple indeed — a death feint or posture. . . . 
A serviceable way to mark off an emotional reac- 
tion from an instinctive reaction is to include in 
the formulation of emotion a factor which may 
be stated as follows : The shock of an emotional 
stimulus throws the organism for a moment at 
least into a chaotic state. . . . We might express 
it in another way by saying that in emotion the 
radius of action lies within the individual's own 
organism; whereas in instinct the radius of ac- 
tion is enlarged to such an extent that the indi- 
vidual as a whole may make adjustments to the 
objects in his environment." 1 

Fatigue and emotion bear a close resemblance 
to each other. This has been experimentally 

i Watson, J. B., "Psychology from the Standpoint of a Be- 
havorist," p. 195. 



122 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

demonstrated. Animals that have been exces- 
sively fatigued show upon examination certain 
definite physiological changes, and similar, if 
not identical, changes have been observed in 
cases of men or animals who have been very 
greatly angered or frightened immediately be- 
fore death. Dr. G. W. Crile, of Cleveland, has 
shown that this is true. He has taken animals 
which have been killed immediately after being 
excessively fatigued, and has examined the 
brain, hypophysis, salivary glands, thyroid, 
parathyroids, lymphatic glands, lungs, heart, 
pancreas, stomach, intestines, spleen, adrenals, 
sex organs, kidneys, bone marrow and muscles. 
He has found that of all these only three are 
affected by fatigue — these being the brain, adre- 
nals and the liver. The effects comprise the 
diminution or disappearance of certain large 
cells, an effect which, there is reason to believe, 
is not overcome by rest. In other words the 
products of fatigue, at least of excessive fatigue, 
are permanent. It has also been shown that the 
results of extreme emotion are of the same kind 
and the same extent. It would look as though 
the three organs mentioned, brain, adrenals and 



THE EFFECTS OF EMOTION 123 

liver, constitute a kind of store-house of energy 
for the body. These three organs together Crile 
calls the kinetic system, and he holds that when 
the other organs of the body are excessively 
actuated they call upon these three organs for 
energy, and that when these three are exhausted 
in turn no replenishment is possible. 

Certain of these glands produce substances in 
emotion or in fatigue which have curious and 
lasting effects upon the organism. The adre- 
nals pour into the system a secretion which we 
know as adrenalin. Adrenalin, when released 
into the system, decreases the tonus or tensile 
strength of muscles and slows the beat of the 
heart. In other words, it produces relaxation 
of the muscles and even when present in such 
a small proportion as one part of adrenalin to 
two hundred million parts of blood. 

Experimental evidence supporting these facts 
is extremely interesting. If one takes blood 
isamples from a quiet animal and places in it a 
istrip or ring of intestinal muscle, that muscle 
will begin and continue to beat or contract regu- 
larly and normally. But if placed in a sample of 
blood taken from a frightened, enraged or terri- 



124 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

fied animal the muscle ring will not beat regu- 
larly, but will relax, and complete inhibition of 
movement may even occur. Such observations 
as these make apparent the reason why extreme 
emotion produces a feeling of weakness, of lax- 
ness, of fatigue. 

It is perfectly possible for a person who is 
very well equipped in every intellectual way 
so as to have nearly all the requisites for success 
to fail in accomplishing much that he desires to 
do simply because he or she is excessively emo- 
tional. The reason is simple. Emotion pro- 
duces effects equivalent to great exhaustion. It 
is as if the emotional person were always doing 
a great deal of extra work. Consequently, his 
energy being used up in emotional ways, there 
is left scarcely sufficient for the ordinary activi- 
ties of life. It can be seen that it is well worth 
while to attempt to discover methods of control- 
ling or regulating emotion. The methods of 
doing so can easily be named, but their working 
is difficult, if not impossible, to explain. We 
have known of these methods for a long time, 
and recent scientific discoveries have by no 
means invalidated that knowledge. Wise men 



THE EFFECTS OF EMOTION 125 

have always counselled faith and courage, 
patience and self-possession, even when they 
have not known why these things were of value. 
The general philosophy of life which one holds, 
the success of his personal relations with other 
men, or the religious outlook aid one tremen- 
dously in the control of his emotion. These 
attitudes are valuable and effective, because in 
some manner not yet clearly understood, they 
quiet our emotional disturbances. 

It is not advisable, even were it possible, to 
attempt to eliminate emotion. The most impor- 
tant thing to consider is that emotion should not 
be abnormal in amount, and the most successful 
way to prevent this is to seek a normal outlet for 
our emotional reactions, and not to try to hide or 
forcibly repress them. Beyond all doubt a very 
great deal of harm is done in this way. Emotion 
will not suffer itself to be destroyed by simple 
repression. Attempts to do so simply result 
in confining its expression to internal glandu- 
lar and visceral disturbances. The person who 
represses his emotion may succeed in keeping 
his face in perfect control and his external 
muscles acting normally, but within he may be a 



126 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

mass of seething movement with gland and vis- 
cera in a state of chaotic reaction. 

Such repression may produce disorders of 
the gravest kind. These disorders usually take 
the form known as " psychic" or " mental." 
They appear, it may be, as extreme likes or 
dislikes for objects or persons not warranting 
such extreme attitudes, they may develop even 
into the realm of hysteria, or of mono-ideism. 
Dreams, when of an unusual nature, may be the 
result of the repression of emotion. Still more 
striking is the way in which such repression 
may reveal itself in physical disorders. For 
instance, prolonged excitement may produce 
a discolored or pimpled complexion. This is 
particularly true if the excitement is sexual in 
origin. A normal release or expression of such 
emotion is very apt to bring with it a complete 
clearing up of the skin disorder, and perhaps 
the amelioration of other bodily ills. 

For the emotional person who realizes the 
bad effects of continued emotion, the remedy is 
to find, in some way or other, some natural out- 
let. It may be found in art, in music, in litera- 
ture, in personal relationships with other peo- 



THE EFFECTS OF EMOTION 127 

pie. For an emotional person to confine him- 
self to himself may resnlt in some bodily injury 
which will reveal itself in decreased efficiency. 
The man or woman who is always worrying, 
the person who is continually afraid, the person 
who is always red-hot for or against a certain 
thing, — in a word, the super-emotional person — 
is less efficient than he might be for the simple 
reason that in his emotion he expends energy 
which should be expended upon his life's work. 



CHAPTER EIGHT 

THE CAUSES OP FAILURE 

THERE is no one feature of college life 
quite so difficult to handle, from the stand- 
point of the teacher, as the failures of the pupil 
in his studies. In every college so far consti- 
tuted there is a certain percentage of students 
who fail to satisfactorily complete their work. 
To the manager of a business, the head of an 
office, the superintendent of a group of salesmen 
probably no problem is more puzzling than why 
some particular man, apparently well equipped, 
fails to do satisfactory work. 

The situations which failures, whether in 
study or in business, bring with them are always 
more or less serious, but it is not the occasional 
failure which one needs to worry about, it is 
the continual failure. There is nothing neces- 
sarily tragic about a single failure in a college 
course or anywhere else; but there is real 

128 



THE CAUSES OF FAILURE 129 

tragedy for the boy or girl, man or woman, who 
fails regularly and habitually in something 
which he or she is trying very hard to do. 

Why do students fail? Why does an appar- 
ently bright young man, one capable of looking 
after himself very successfully in other forms 
of activity, prove unable to compete with his 
fellows in college? Or why does a man or 
woman who is capable of passing successfully 
in all of his studies but one, find that there is 
something about that one which makes it quite 
impossible for him? The question as to why 
students fail is not very different from the more 
general question, "Why do men in general attain 
different levels of success?" And perhaps the 
answer to the smaller query will prove to be an 
answer to the larger as well. 

There are several possibilities which have to 
be considered in the diagnosis of any particular 
case. Students may fail because they are feeble- 
minded. This explanation does not usually 
please the student if one quotes it to him as 
the reason for his not getting on. That does 
not, however, affect its possible truth. (If one 
should genuinely suspect the mental compe- 



130 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

tency of a student that suspicion would not be 
communicated to* the student in bald terms, by 
any teacher or psychologist worthy of the name.) 
This feeble-mindedness may be general. That 
is to say, the student in question may belong 
actually and technically in that group of people 
who are mentally incapable of meeting the 
requirements of the society in which they live. 
It happens very seldom, of course, that a feeble- 
minded person gets into college, or into any 
responsible position in the business world, but 
now and then it does happen. 

But a young person who is not at all techni- 
cally feeble-minded may not possess mentality 
of a sufficiently high level to be able to profit 
by a college course. There is, after all, no 
reason why everyone should expect to be able 
to complete and profit by a college course. The 
college population is a selected group. That 
does not mean that there are not young people 
as able and quick and thorough in their mental 
processes outside the college as in it, but it does 
mean that there are many young people whose 
mental abilities are not sufficient to allow them 
to enter or remain in a first-class college. The 



THE CAUSES OF FAILURE 131 

college would lose its chief value to the commu- 
nity if it were levelled down to the intelligence 
of the lowest five per cent of the population, or 
even, it may be, to the intelligence of the aver- 
age. It must be so arranged as to serve the 
most highly gifted of our young people. Only 
in this way can the leaders of the nation be 
produced. 

But young people of low intelligence do man- 
age to get into college, probably coming from 
backward high schools, and these account for 
a small percentage of the failures. 

There seems to exist in some individuals a 
kind of mental insufficiency or inability toward 
particular fields. This is probably not related 
to technical feeble-mindedness, properly so- 
called. But every now and then the teacher 
sees a student who apparently displays a real 
inability to master a certain particular subject. 
His standings may be good in all other lines 
of study, but there is one subject in which he 
displays what seems to resemble actual mental 
weakness. He may do well in everything except, 
say, English Composition. There are students 
who cannot learn mathematics. Their languages 



132 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

may come easily. They may be able to do labo- 
ratory work. They may be able to appreciate 
and understand literature, but plane geometry 
and algebra are unsolved mysteries, and remain 
so, even though very great effort is expended 
in trying to learn them. Perhaps more students 
show inability to master language than any 
other subject. The effort at learning is real, 
but the material is not conquered. 

In so far as actual inability to master a sub- 
ject is concerned, it is probably very rare. What 
amounts practically to the same thing, a distaste 
for a subject so extreme that the student cannot 
work at that subject for long periods, is not so 
rare. An explanation is not easy to find. In 
many cases it lies in unfortunate experiences 
which occurred when the student first made his 
acquaintance with the subject. The dislike for 
a subject may be, at base, a dislike for the 
circumstances under which it was first met, or 
even a dislike for the teacher who first intro- 
duced one to it. 

A far more frequently seen cause of failure 
than the above is the fact that a capable man 
or woman is interested in something else more 



THE CAUSES OF FAILURE 133 

than he is interested in his studies. The cream 
of his energy and the best parts of his working 
time go to doing something other than his actual 
college or professional work. There are many 
isuch forms of divided interest. Perhaps the 
most common distraction, for college men at 
least, is athletics. It is no part of the writer's 
intention to attack athletics in college. Under 
modern management the evil that athletics do 
has been reduced to a minimum, and the good 
increased very much. But for all that, it remains 
true that there are some men, not always those 
who engage most actively in athletics, who spend 
far too much time playing or thinking or dis- 
cussing football or baseball or some other form 
of sport. 

A very different group of men and women 
have to spend so much time and energy in earn- 
ing the means to pay their college expenses that 
they have not sufficient time left over to apply 
to their college work. Some students who put 
themselves through college expend so much time 
and energy putting themselves through that 
they have little left to get anything out of col- 
lege as they go through. It is quite obvious that 



134 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

this kind of tiling does not pay. It may be that 
before very long the colleges will require that 
students who are forced to earn their college 
expenses while studying must take a longer 
period for the college course than those who 
have nothing to do but study. 

It frequently happens that a student's interest 
may be in pleasure, perhaps in the more harm- 
less forms of it, such as fiction reading, or 
movies, or sight-seeing, perhaps in the more 
vicious forms. It is sufficient to say that the 
man who spends his time doing one thing is not 
going to succeed in doing something entirely 
different. Again, a man or woman may be fail- 
ing in college because he or she is too actively 
interested in one of the opposite sex. Cupid has 
ruined a college course for many a student, even 
though the student has not dropped out of 
school. Every teacher in a coeducational school 
can think of numerous examples of this kind. 

There are a certain number of failures occur- 
ring in college all the time which are due to 
certain forms of physical defects, or to improper 
physiological habits. The cause may be very 
easy to find, and a visit to the oculist or dentist 



THE CAUSES OF FAILURE 135 

or throat specialist may remedy the difficulty. 
Diseased eyes or teeth or tonsils have caused 
many a failure in college. Or a student may 
have improper dietary habits, may not know 
what to eat, may on very rare occasions not 
have the means of getting enough to eat. And 
habits which are vicious, such as the excessive 
use of alcohol or tobacco or illicit sex attitudes 
play their part, albeit a small one. 

There is another group of factors making for 
failure in study which is a little hard to describe 
without being unduly technical. To the psy- 
chologist these are known as obsessions and 
repressions. They are to be found in the cases 
of the " worrying " student, the slightly hysteric 
person, and the one who labors under somewhat 
of a " neuropathic inheritance." This whole 
subject is a profound one, and should be left 
in the hands of specialists for treatment. That 
such cases exist in college as well as in the bus- 
iness world there can be no doubt. Also that 
many of them can be remedied by wise and sym- 
pathetic treatment is also beyond doubt. 

The student who is failing in college should 
first of all determine why he is failing, which 



136 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

may be a more difficult task for him to perform 
for himself than he may think. It is wise that 
he should take the advice of someone else. It 
may be that in the not far distant future most 
American colleges will have an office or a bureau 
whose task it will be to consult with the failing 
student from the standpoint of the psychologist, 
and determine just exactly what it is that is 
blocking his path. For the very large majority 
of unsuccessful students there is every reason 
to believe that the causes of failure are remov- 
able. If a student, however, finally becomes con- 
vinced that he cannot succeed in college, the 
wisest thing for him to do is to pick some line 
of life in which he has a fair hope of success 
and to enter that at the earliest possible date. 
While the foregoing parts of this chapter 
have been written with the student particularly 
in mind, the principles discussed are general 
enough to apply to most people who are failing 
in something in which they wish very much to 
succeed. Nothing has been said of the person 
who fails, it matters not in what line, because 
he does not really care whether he succeeds or 
not. But men and women who are working 



THE CAUSES OF FAILURE 137 

along any lines requiring a large amount of 
intellectual labor, are in a situation similar to 
that of the student, and what is true of one class 
is true of the other. 



CHAPTER NINE 

THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 

IT is always easy to offer advice, and it is 
sometimes disastrous to take it. Perhaps 
there are two subjects regarding which no per- 
son should be too ready to accept advice. One 
of these is the profession in which a man em- 
barks for life; the other concerns the person 
he is to marry. In both of these cases the effect 
of the choice is so personal and affects other 
people so little and the considerations involved 
are so intimate that there is not much proba- 
bility that advice will prove valuable, even when 
coming from the best meaning of advisers. 

There are, however, certain considerations 
which are worth setting forth and which should 
always be remembered by the young person 
facing that most difficult of all choices, the selec- 
tion of a vocation. There are many young people 
who never select a vocation, in the proper mean- 

138 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 139 

ing of that word. Instead they simply accept 
the job lying nearest at hand and are content to 
go or to drift wherever the stream of fortune 
chooses to carry them. But to a large number 
of people, particularly educated people, such 
a course is inconceivable, and to them there 
comes a time when a deliberate choice of a pro- 
fession must be made. It is to such young 
people that this is written, and to them are made 
the following simple general considerations. 

First: Avoid blind-alley jobs. That is to 
say, be very wary of a position which does not 
naturally act as the approach to another and 
higher position. Beware of work which is not 
training you in doing expertly something which 
is fundamentally worth doing. Do not take that 
kind of a job which cannot be left unless one, 
as it were, turns around and retraces his steps. 
Of course it is true that some apparently blind- 
alley jobs finally prove not to be so. There have 
been many cases of men who, having accepted 
positions which seem to offer no future what- 
soever, have found a future in them. Probably 
such men saw that future when others did not, 
and for that reason accepted that position. 



140 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

Second: Avoid unpleasant jobs. This may 
sound like very unethical advice. It may seem 
like catering to our instinctive desires for pleas- 
ant and easy circumstances. It must be remem- 
bered, however, that the reference is to life jobs. 
All positions have something unpleasant con- 
nected with them. There is probably no way 
of earning a livelihood which does not contain 
monotonous, or even disagreeable or repulsive 
features. Every man in every kind of work 
undoubtedly has moments in which he is abso- 
lutely convinced that his position is the hardest, 
the most trying and the most full of drudgery 
of all positions. But while all this may be true, 
it is essential to full success in one's life work 
that one 1 does not choose any trade, profession 
or business which, to the one choosing, is funda- 
mentally unpleasant. A man has very little 
chance of attaining a large measure of success 
if he is not happy in his work. There is, fur- 
ther, the deeper consideration that even if one is 
commercially or professionally successful, such 
success has cost too much, is not worth while, 
unless one is happy at the same time. 

Be sure, then, that the job you choose is, basi- 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 141 

eally, an attractive one, that you will like doing 
the things you will have to do, that you think 
the job is worth doing, and that you can look 
forward to a lifetime of doing it without con- 
scious flinching. 

Third: Don't forget the ruthless practical 
demands of every-day life. Take a business-like 
attitude toward your own working and creative 
powers. Be sure that the task you contemplate 
does not require of you more than you are really 
able to give it. Do not think that your life, your 
abilities, your young strength are small things 
to be lightly thrown away, to be wasted in the 
storming of an all but impregnable fortress. Do 
not be over-impressed by ideals of impracticable 
idealism. Do not try to reform the world all by 
yourself, nor in this generation. 

It can be truthfully said of the majority of 
young people that the greatest responsibility 
that shall ever come to them in the course of 
life will be that conferred by the possession of 
a family of their own ; and that no demands will 
ever be made upon them so insistent as those 
made by their own children. For while the truth 
of this statement is not always evident to young 



142 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

people, it becomes evident later in life, and 
sometimes at a time or place in which the person 
concerned may be forced to admit, however 
unwillingly, that they have taken upon them- 
selves responsibilities of a nature which makes 
it inconvenient or impossible for them to be 
really fair to their own family. An illustration 
of this statement may not be out of order, al- 
though many people may disagree as to its real 
point. The writer will always remember with a 
good deal of feeling certain expressions used to 
him by a young girl, a student of his at the time 
the remarks were made. She had been born in 
a missionary family in a certain Eastern coun- 
try and, as the custom is, was sent home to 
America while little more than an infant. It 
was impossible for her education to be properly 
cared for in the land of her birth. In other 
words, her parents had placed themselves in 
the position of being more responsible for the 
well-being of others than for that of their chil- 
dren. The remarks made by this young girl on 
the occasion referred to were fervent and emo- 
tional, and were the product of very deep feel- 
ing which she only partially concealed. She had 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 143 

been brought up in a Home for Missionary Chil- 
dren, where she had been only tolerably happy. 
She did not see her father or her mother for 
periods of at least seven years at a time. As 
she herself put it, "A person has no right to 
have children if they are not going to look after 
them themselves." 

Perhaps the sense of the foregoing paragraph 
may be summed up by saying that no choice of 
a life work should neglect entirely the respon- 
sibilities conferred if one should have children. 
Even in the cases of those who have deliberately 
and solemnly decided on celibacy, it may be 
remembered that such decisions have a way of 
being reversed. 

Fourth: Don't be sordid. Nothing that has 
been said above is to the effect that material 
success is the greatest value existence can give. 
It is not. While you are planning to make a 
living, plan also to make a life, the kind of life 
that will enable you to be good company for 
yourself when you are old. A certain position 
may pay less than others and still be the prefer- 
able position for a certain man. That is to say, 
it may be the position in which he will be most 



144 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

happy, will do the best work and where his abil- 
ity and gifts will count for the most. 

The foregoing remarks probably illustrate 
what has been said in the beginning of the chap- 
ter about the improbability of a person profiting 
much by advice in the choice of a vocation. A 
job that is unpleasant to one man will not be so 
to another. The kind of thing that seems very 
well worth doing to Mr. Smith, seems to Mr. 
Jones quite trifling. The income which will 
keep one man happy and contented, give him 
what he needs to make his life comfortable and 
complete, may not be at all sufficient for another 
man, because the conditions of his life are of a 
different order. All that one man asks or needs 
may be a small garden and a room full of books ; 
another man may just as sincerely require 
traveling, or big game hunting, or some other 
form of extremely expensive recreation. The 
choice of a vocation should be made by a man 
for himself, because the responsibility of that 
choice must be borne by him chiefly, if not 
entirely. 

So much for the general considerations in- 
volved in choosing a career. It may be well to 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 145 

mention certain specific methods more or less 
known and used at present. If one turns over 
the advertising pages of certain widely circu- 
lated magazines, there will be found pages of 
advertisements of various methods purporting 
to teach, for a consideration, how to determine 
the possession of certain special abilities on the 
part of individual men and women. 

As far as the possession of special ability 
goes, the average psychologist is willing to admit 
that there is such a thing. But when it comes 
to the question whether or not such ability can 
be recognized before it has been revealed by per- 
formance, most psychologists are very doubtful, 
to say the least. The psychologist sees, and no 
one better, that certain people have the inborn 
ability to perform certain kinds of tasks, and 
that there is great individual variation in this 
regard. But he recognizes the existence of this 
inborn ability after the person has proved that 
he possesses it by performing the tasks in ques- 
tion with unusual facility. 

There is a widespread demand to-day for 
some method of determining in childhood what 
abilities that child will evince in maturity. The 



146 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

advantages of such foreknowledge are obvious. 
It would be of incalculable value in planning a 
course of education for that child. It is unfor- 
tunate that there are no such methods in exist- 
ence. Nor are they likely to come into existence 
in the near future. The opinion of competent 
psychologists on this point is practically unan- 
imous. 

Closely related to this idea is the idea, held 
by many men, that individuals belong to certain 
groups, few in number, and that there are defi- 
nite ways of approaching members of each of 
these groups so as to create in them cordial 
appreciation or aversion, as the case may be. 
Some time ago the writer was approached on 
the street by a young man of his acquaintance, 
a college graduate, by the way, who asked to be 
referred to readings which would enable him, 
as he said, "to so sum up each prospect that I 
approach that I will know exactly how to deal 
with him so as to sell him some insurance." 
There is no doubt that if such a scientifically 
accurate estimation of a prospective customer 
were possible it would be a great help, at least 
to the seller, though perhaps the enforced buyer 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 147 

might have some misgivings on the subject. 
But in the present state of our knowledge, there 
is no possibility of such a method actually exist- 
ing and working, nor is there any strong proba- 
bility that it ever will exist. Men are not cast 
in molds, and there is no way of telling from the 
appearance of a man exactly and in detail how 
to speak to him or to handle him, to sell him 
insurance or anything else. 

Historically there have been methods or sys- 
tems of methods, all more or less on the border- 
line of fraud, which have pretended to analyze 
the character of people by their external physi- 
cal characteristics. The oldest of such systems 
is that of " Phrenology," founded by Gall in the 
first decade of the nineteenth century, and some- 
what modified later by Spurzheim and certain 
others. The phrenological concept assumed 
that there were certain definite units of mental 
ability, and that each of these was the product 
of a certain part of the brain. These unit men- 
tal characteristics were known as "faculties," 
and the portion of the brain producing them was 
known as the "organ" of that particular faculty. 
Methods of examination were introduced and 



148 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

the heads of men, women and children examined. 
When certain abilities were present in marked 
degree, and it happened that the individual or 
individuals concerned had certain peculiarities 
of cranial curvature, it was immediately con- 
cluded that these bumps concealed the organs 
of the abilities under investigation. In this way 
the skull was outlined, and divided into organs, 
there being about thirty-three of these. This 
phrenological concept was never in very good 
scientific standing, and is completely obsolete 
to-day. There are certain definite reasons 
stamping it as an impossible concept which are 
capable of brief statement. 

First : The methods of determining what con- 
stituted a faculty or unit mental characteristic 
were illogical. There is no reason why by the 
use of that method thirty-three hundred charac- 
teristics could not have been arrived at. For 
instance, if musical ability is a unit mental char- 
acteristic, as the phrenologists claimed, why not 
architectural ability? Why not china-painting 
ability, or drain-digging ability, or potato-plant- 
ing ability? There is no obvious reason why 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 149 

any one of these should be considered as a unit 
any more than the others. 

Second : The phrenologists were interested in 
the contour of the brain, but they studied and 
measured the contour of the skull, which is a 
different thing. It may be true that the contour 
of the brain follows the curves of the skull fairly 
accurately, but it is also true that the incidence 
of curvature is by no means close enough to 
permit of substituting the curves of one for the 
curves of the other. Yet there are insurmount- 
able difficulties in the way of measuring the con- 
tour of the brain itself. 

Third : Certain discoveries in 1870 by Fritsch 
and Hitzig, supplemented by later findings by 
many others have revealed about how the brain 
works. Our knowledge to-day concerning local- 
ization of function is of such a nature that it 
completely excludes the possibility of the brain 
being divided as the phrenologist suggests. We 
know that certain areas of the brain control cer- 
tain muscles, certain other areas the various 
sensory functions. And, though there are cer- 
tain areas of brain surface of which the function 
is a mystery, we do know that they do not con- 



150 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

trol particular abilities in any way whatsoever. 
Pathological, histological and operative evidence 
puts that beyond doubt. 

The pity of the whole thing is that many well- 
meaning men and women who, perhaps, should 
have known better, have exposed the heads of 
their sons to the hands of the phrenologist, and 
in consequence of his verdict have sometimes 
overurged the advisability of entering some dis- 
liked profession or business, with resulting un- 
happiness to all concerned. 

There is very little that can be told about a 
man by casually glancing at his face, at the 
shape of his nose, or ears, or mouth or chin. 
Only within the widest limits can one judge a 
man by his face. It is recorded of Edwin M. 
Stanton, Secretary of War in President Lin- 
coln's cabinet, that on an occasion when some 
one objected to his criticism of the meanness in 
a certain man's face, as being something for 
which the man was not responsible, he replied : 
" Every man over fifty is responsible for his 
face. " 1 No doubt this statement contains many 

i Bradford, Gamaliel: "Edwin M, Stanton," Atlantic 
Monthly, August, 1915. 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 151 

elements of truth as far as it goes. It is founded 
on the fact that the muscles of the face which 
are used in speaking, laughing or frowning are 
somewhat plastic, and the habit of years will 
give them a permanent "set." 

Experimental psychologists, properly so- 
called, have very little to say about the possi- 
bility of vocational tests. Probably the majority 
of them in this country are frankly skeptical 
as to their value beyond determining normality 
of intelligence or the proper place of a child in 
a particular school system, 

The careful summing up of the tastes and 
preferences, and still more, of the aptitudes and 
abilities of the one looking for a position will 
give more information than anything else. 
What kind of thing does this man or boy like 
to do? How does he spend his spare time? 
When he has a whole day's holiday, what does 
he do with it? Is there anything he can do 
unusually well? Has he any outstanding ambi- 
tion? What would he do were the whole world 
open to him, and he could take the choice of any 
position in existence? The answers to such 
questions as these will provide some informa- 



152 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

tion as to the kind of position in which such a 
man will be apt to succeed. 

As a matter of fact, however, that which actu- 
ally determines the large majority of choices of 
positions, and, as usually follows, of careers, is 
not the natural aptitude of the man but the avail- 
ability of the position. A very large number of 
men and women accept their first position be- 
cause it is ready at hand, and at the same time 
is not positively repugnant. This is regrettable. 
For instance, a young man enters the office of 
a manufacturing company as a clerk. The firm 
he works for handles goods in which he has no 
particular interest. He expects to force himself 
to acquire such an interest with the passage of 
the years, and to become genuinely concerned 
over the fortunes of cotton, or coffee, or candy 
or chairs. In very many cases he succeeds, and 
leads a tolerably happy life. He may, however, 
have moments in which he wishes that he had 
searched the field of human endeavor more 
carefully before he irrevocably chose that corner 
in which kis life's work should thenceforth be 
done. 

A particularly unfortunate example of this 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 153 

accidental choice of a profession is to be found 
in teaching. A very large number of young 
people, young women especially, enter the pro- 
fession of teaching for the sole reason that it 
is handy. The work is not attractive, though it 
may not be absolutely repulsive; it is merely 
available. Teaching positions are not very diffi- 
cult to obtain. Some of the young people who go 
into teaching in this casual way may be deceived 
by an idea that their hours will be short and 
their pay good. But even if they understood 
the truth in these two respects, the probability 
is that the easy availability of teaching positions 
would continue to attract young women. To 
some extent this position is brought about by 
the fact that a large number of young women 
applying for teaching positions are simply look- 
ing for positions for two or three years, after 
which they expect to be married. But a great 
number of them become teachers, not from 
choice, because they have done no choosing, but 
because a teaching position is comparatively 
easy to obtain. The effect on our school sys- 
tems is most unfortunate. 

Closely allied to the subject which has just 



154 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

been discussed is the question of what charac- 
teristics are necessary for success. What will 
determine the success of a man in his chosen 
field? 

As has just been said, above all things a man 
must like his work. 

One of the principal characteristics which 
produces success is industry, the ability to work 
hard, and to keep working for a long time. Any 
man who hopes to do any form of work very well 
has got to get the habit of keeping its problems 
before his mind's eye for long and tiresome 
periods. 

Quite as important as the matter of industry 
is the matter of intelligence. A man who works 
hard will get somewhere, but he will not get 
nearly so far if he be a stupid man as if he be 
bright. But here we deal with a factor which 
we cannot increase, no matter how much we 
wish. A man's intelligence is of a given amount 
and he simply has to use such of it as he pos- 
sesses. The average normal person, however, 
probably has more intelligence than he ever 
uses, and the vast majority of persons do not 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 155 

ha\>e to worry about being intelligent enough 
for their positions. 

It is rather trite to say that a man must be 
holiest. Of course he must. But he must be 
more. He must never be even suspected of dis- 
honesty. Like Caesar's wife, he must, literally, 
be above suspicion. Interesting evidence of this 
truth is given by the questions asked by the big 
bonding companies of those whose names are 
given them as references by men asking for 
bond. Examples are as follows: "Have you 
ever heard that he has been suspected: Of drunk- 
enness, of gambling, speculation, extravagance, 
dishonorable conduct, fraud or dishonesty V — 
The Massachusetts Bonding and Insurance Com- 
pany. "Was he ever suspected of fraud or dis- 
honesty or any dishonorable act? Is he, or has 
he ever been, addicted to intemperance, gam- 
bling, immorality, or other vice?" — The United 
States Fidelity and Guarantee Company. Is he 
"sober, careful and reliable; lives within his 
means; is free of even the suspicion of fraud 
or dishonesty, dishonorable or improper con- 
duct, gambling, drinking or speculation?" — The 
Am erican Surety Company. And the United 



156 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

States Civil Service Commission asks as well: 
''Does lie use profane, vulgar or coarse lan- 
guage f " 2 

To be above suspicion is to liave a valuable 
asset indeed. To students this is a matter of 
interest. What about a student who is dishonest 
in class? Is it probable, more, is it possible, 
that if you ever have to have business dealings 
with a person whom you have known to have 
been dishonest in the classes which you attended 
together, you will feel absolutely sure tha: his 
word is reliable ? Will such a man ever be free 
of the suspicion of dishonesty? 

The ability to work with others is based upon 
generously estimating the faults and virtues, 
the failures and successes of one's colleagues. 
It requires patience and kindness and fairness, 
— these are not particularly prevalent qualities, 
and their possession is an asset undoubtedly. 

Add to these another factor— the ability to 
take a far view, to see the future and the past, 
and to weigh the present in its proper rela- 
tion to these. This means that one must see the 
real living importance of particular failures or 

2 Puffer, J. Adams : "Vocational Guidance," pp. 266-268. 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 157 

particular successes, of particular pleasures or 
particular deprivatious. The worthwhileness 
of certain endeavors, the actual importance of 
the results of labor, all these enter into what 
is meant by a far view. One must evaluate his 
work sub specie cetemitas. 

To the above may be added one more state- 
ment in the form of a quotation from the rail- 
road magnate, the late James J. Hill, "If you 
want to know whether you are going to be a 
success or failure in life, you can easily find out. 
The test is simple and infallible. Are you able 
to save money ? If not, drop out ! You will fail 
as sure as you live. You may not think so, but 
you will. The seed of success is not in you.' , 

The above statement may seem harsh, sordid 
and inconsequential, but it probably contains 
more than a grain of truth. It is not easy to 
save money, no matter how large one's income 
may be. It requires patience and self-sacrifice 
and, above all, the ability to take a far view. 
If a man possesses these, he most certainly 
possesses the characteristics which make for 
success. 

A few words are in order in conclusion about 



158 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

certain special professions, or rather about cer- 
tain special abilities which are of use in certain 
professions. 

First : Mechanical ability. If a young person 
possesses mechanical ability of a high order 
and is able by study to couple with that ability 
theoretic knowledge he has assets of a very high 
value which will pay him well. Men of this 
type are represented by the engineer, by the 
inventor, to some extent by the physical scien- 
tists and the surgeon. 

Second: Executive ability is the ability to 
handle men, to lay out their courses of acts, to 
suggest ways and means to them without antag- 
onizing or repulsing them, to plan ahead, to 
organize, to decide quickly, to ' ' stand the gaff. ' ' 
The executive has to accept responsibility, he 
has to accept blame, he has to be perfectly will- 
ing to stand by what he has done. Of all pro- 
fessions this is the most highly paid. 

Third : Salesmanship. It is especially impor- 
tant if one would be a salesman that he have a 
natural delight in trading. He must be a good 
"mixer." He should not be too great a talker, 
and must be a hard worker. He is probably 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 159 

happier if he possess a temperament that is not 
easily rebuffed nor subject to oscillation, to 
extremes of pessimism and optimism. 

Fourth: Many of the professions, for in- 
stance, those of the scientist, the lawyer and the 
doctor, require as their fundamental pre-requi- 
site that one have an overwhelming interest in 
a certain subject. This is the fact, hidden to 
many people, which makes the work of such 
men often so satisfactory and pleasant to them- 
selves. They are very much interested in the 
thing they are doing. They would rather do 
that thing than anything else under the sun, and 
although in many cases they do not receive 
much worldly recognition nor very high salary, 
yet they may be extremely happy. 



CHAPTER TEN 

CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 

THE discussion of character and tempera- 
ment constitutes, to some extent, the sum- 
ming up of all that has been said about instinct, 
habit, memory, repression, obsession, attention 
and reasoning, with perhaps a few elements 
added. Do not these determine the character of 
the man! Knowing these, do you not know the 
man himself? It may be possible to say in 
reply that all one knows is how the man will act, 
and not the essential man. The thesis of this 
chapter is that the man who acts is the real man, 
and that his activities are determined by the list 
of factors just mentioned. 

In other words, character is not something 
distinct from the ordinary methods of moving 
and remembering, of feeling and thinking. It 
is the name which we give to all of these psy- 
chological factors in operation together. 

Character is the sum of the veritable attitudes 

160 



CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 161 

of man toward the situations and problems of 
his ordinary life. The term implies a certain 
degree of foreknowledge as to how a particu- 
lar man will act in the future, and is founded 
upon our knowledge of his past performances. 
It more or less assumes that if we knew enough 
of what a man has done, or has been, or what 
he has seen or read, we are able to prognosticate 
how he will act in a given situation. Now and 
then we are disappointed at our failures to do 
this. Such failures must, in the last analysis, 
be caused by the gaps in our knowledge of the 
man, for the man who does certain things appar- 
ently inconsistent with his character, is simply 
acting in a way inconsistent with our knowledge 
of his character, and in no way inconsistent with 
his actual character. We may not know him 
thoroughly, but his actions are the truest 
revelation of his rea? self. 

There are as many characters in existence as 
there are men, and they do not, therefore, fall 
into any sweeping classification, but for all that, 
there are certain particular forms of character 
which may be sufficiently recognizable to be 
worthy of discussion. We speak of men pos- 



162 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

sessing strong character or weak character or 
explosive or vacillating or undecided character. 
These terms all mean something, although they 
are all so popularly used in the loosest kind of 
way. Take, for instance, the man of so-called 
strong character. This expression means essen- 
tially that the man in question is one of habitual 
dependability — that we know ahead of time what 
he is going to do, and can prophesy his behavior 
with some little degree of confidence. It is 
worth pointing out that such a man may not be 
a good man, that strong character and goodness 
are not synonymous terms at all. A bad man 
of the worst possible type, — a murderer, a 
thief, an habitual criminal — may be a man of 
the strongest possible character. 

The man of strong character is the one who 
is chiefly influenced by long past situations. 
That which happened yesterday influences him 
very little as compared with that which hap- 
pened last week or ten years ago. This means 
that there have occurred situations in the man's 
life the effect of which has been lasting. And 
these past influences are more potent to deter- 
mine the activity of the man than any stimula- 



CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 163 

tion which may happen to be present at any 
moment later on. We find examples of this in 
every sphere of life. The student who has an 
ambition toward attaining professional success, 
an ambition which came to him in his boyhood 
days, is capable of disregarding the ever-present 
stimulus of fatigue or of poverty during his 
student days. The strength of the character of 
the student is made evident by his ability to dis- 
regard the present stimulus in favor of the past. 
A similar situation may be found in the way in 
which a man may be moved by the motive of 
revenge. Some wrong done to him may come 
to be the controlling factor in his life. Nothing 
else is quite so important ; and because of that 
one situation the balance of his life is colored 
and his activities are directed entirely to the 
satisfaction of his vengeance. 

The man who is too much influenced by the 
long past situation is the man we call the con- 
servative, the Tory — the man who is continually 
speaking of the good old days and who sincerely 
believes that in time past the school systems 
were better, the newspapers were more able, the 
winter storms more severe — nothing nowadays 



164 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

is as good as it was then. This man is essentially 
a " No ' ' man. His natural reaction to most situ- 
ations which occur suddenly is a negative one. 
A particular man, for instance, an able man, a 
leader in the industrial and religious worlds, 
well known to the writer, seems invariably to 
react negatively toward every novel situation. 
He has been known to say when a certain project 
was put before him, meeting as a member of a 
certain committee, that the proposition was new 
to him, but he was against it. He had had no 
time to think it over. He did not wait to balance 
the situation at all but he was at once against 
anything in any degree novel. 

Such a man is undoubtedly strong, and plays 
a necessary part in our social organization. But 
when his characteristic attitude is overdevel- 
oped, it is apt to produce harmful results in the 
way of preventing interesting or valuable in- 
novations. 

The type of character which is ordinarily 
termed weak or vacillating is that of the man 
who is chiefly affected by the immediately pres- 
ent stimulus. He is the plaything of the forces 
about him. You may read in him the men with 



CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 165 

whom lie has lately been conversing, the books 
he has just read, the experiences he has lately 
passed through. He does not gather nrach last- 
ing effect from his experiences. He is at the 
mercy of the present situation, whatever it may 
happen to be. He reflects his chance companions 
of the moment. 

If you find such a man in church, he is the most 
religious of the religious, and, in a sense, is so 
quite seriously. If he is coaxed into a saloon, 
he enters that and its attendant life with enthu- 
siasm. There he is the boon companion of his 
associates. Whatever he does, he does under 
the influence of the men immediately around 
him and he plays his part with energy. 

Such men may be either ' ' Yes " or " No ' ' men. 
Ordinarily they are "Yes" men, — perfectly 
willing to agree with every situation, avoiding 
nothing so much as collision or difficulty. Occa- 
sionally he may be a "No" man, that is to say 
he is consistently controlled by the situations in 
which he finds himself, but controlled negatively. 
He is always at odds with the people with whom 
his lot is cast. He is always "Agin' the Govern- 
ment." He is always objecting. If you meet 



166 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

such a man on his way to the polls, you can con- 
trol his vote by being careful to vehemently criti- 
cise the man whom you wish him to support. 
His natural perversity will appear and he will 
vote for that man. Actual cases of this kind 
may, no doubt, be supplied by the experience of 
many who read this. 

Men of this type are apt to be found among 
radicals and extremists, they are often men 
with a small grievance, usually unjustified. 

There are numbers of men who can be classed 
in neither of these groups. Fortunately such 
men constitute the majority of mankind. In 
most men there is a certain combination of judg- 
ment and reasoning with the ability to act. On 
the whole, the majority of men are sanely capa- 
ble of weighing and comparing remote and 
recent stimuli and of deciding which of the two 
is the better guide of action. The majority of 
men can neither be described as "Yes" or "No" 
men, they are sometimes "Yes" and sometimes 
"No." Certain principles and certain prefer- 
ences and, it must be admitted, certain preju- 
dices, are present in the majority of us, but 
generally speaking, we use a fair amount of 



CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 167 

judgment and a fair amount of reasoning in 
controlling our activities. 

So much in explanation of what is meant by 
character. Suppose men assume that these 
various forms of character exist, and that one 
is preferable to another? Suppose we experi- 
ence or imagine a form of character which we 
would like to attain or possess? What can we 
do about it? How can I attain that preferable 
character myself? What can be said about the 
process of character building? That, after all, 
is the practical and important question. 

There are three or four things that may be 
said about character building, but it must be 
understood that when they are said the question 
will not be completely settled. There remains 
something of the nature of artistry, as opposed 
to technique, in character building, and in some 
sense it is fundamentally true that art cannot 
be taught. 

In the first place, character grows slowly. 
There is some advantage in slow development. 
Speaking very generally, slow growth produces 
rather durable material and long and valuable 
life. This is more or less true in the zoological 



168 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

and botanical world, and it is probably even more 
true in the mental world. The average psycholo- 
gist is not particularly glad to find a child who 
has developed extremely quickly. The preco- 
cious child is not always the healthiest, speaking 
in a psychological sense, and the curve of acqui- 
sition of knowledge and skill which slants up 
very suddenly is not necessarily the best curve. 
One of the prominent psychologists in this coun- 
try has said that any system of education which 
teaches a small child a very great deal in a very 
short time is thereby proved a bad system. And 
as in the mental, so in the moral realm. The 
character of man is formed throughout weeks, 
months and years of childhood and boyhood life. 
It is formed in his play, in his reading, in his 
pleasures, and in his tasks. Character is not to 
be thought of as suddenly developing. Only 
very gradually does one realize that he who was 
the child of yesterday is the man of to-day, an 
individual, expressing individual attitudes to- 
ward the world in which he lives. 

Further, character building is inevitable. 
Beyond all doubt the effect of to-day will be 
present to-morrow. There are no very rapid 



CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 169 

changes. Even apparently sudden religious 
conversions have histories. The apparent break- 
down in character is, after all, not a sudden 
breakdown. In a sense, a person never acts out 
of character, if we but knew all. The boy who 
is cowardly in his games while in school is not 
going to become suddenly courageous when he 
enters business life. The student who is dis- 
honest in his classes is not going to suddenly 
become a pattern of rectitude in his commercial 
or business life. The inevitability of character 
building has its tragic aspect. That which is 
written is incapable of being erased. There is 
a sense in which we cannot turn over a new leaf. 
We cannot disregard yesterday. We cannot 
simply resolve to neglect any particular group 
of experiences or action, and say that we will 
not count these. They are counted, and they are 
part of us. 

Character building begins with thinking. The 
man's thoughts are the beginning of the man's 
acts, and the acts of his final character. It is 
probably not possible for the man to be a 
dreamer, and also a daring and incisive execu- 
tive. It is not possible for the small boy to be 



170 YOUTR AND THE OPEN DOOR 

wildly impracticable in his mental life, and 
densely prosaic in all his business life. Nor is 
it possible for one's thoughts to follow impure 
or salacious lines and the external life to con- 
tinue for an indefinite period pure and chaste. 

That which is begun in thought continues in 
act. There is an actual continuity between think- 
ing and acting, basic in nature, incapable of 
being neglected. As thinking is the beginning 
of action, so action must result from thinking. 
These two forms of activity are not fundamen- 
tally diverse. Action produces or develops into 
general attitudes and habits. These constitute 
whole groups of relationships between the indi- 
vidual and society in which he lives. That which 
in the beginning is quite trivial, it may be an 
ordinary fit of anger or jealousy, it may be sim- 
ple curiosity, is capable of finally becoming a 
confirmed pessimism, an aversion to society or 
impurity. No one of these is capable of being 
inconsistent with its mental progenitor. Finally, 
there results that which we call character or 
personality. Little by little has grown an inde- 
structible entity, which, whether we like or dis- 



CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 171 

Hke it, cannot be overturned or destroyed in a 
moment. 

Temperament is the name which we give to 
the persistent little idiosyncracies of response. 
Particular groups of people may be known as 
respectively pugnacious, or cheerful, or pessi- 
mistic or fun-finding. These groups will, in the 
face of similar situations, act in different ways. 
To some men the world is always on its last 
legs. Everything that is good is passing away 
and there is nothing to look forward to but a 
very dismal future indeed. To certain other 
people everything is beautiful, there is a good 
side even in the most dire situations. The silver 
lining of the clouds is always more obvious than 
the clouds themselves, and it must be a very 
serious trouble indeed which produces depres- 
sion. Another man accepts everything that 
comes in a righting mood. He is pugnacious to 
everyone and everything. He often offends, and 
he means to offend. He regards the world as 
an opponent to be mastered and conquered. One 
of the facts most characteristic of such attitudes 
is their persistency. 

That such attitudes are, to some extent, the 



172 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

result of training is beyond all doubt. Early ex- 
perience, early influences, certain kinds of educa- 
tion, particular failures or successes in life, all 
of these enter very largely into determining the 
individual's attitude toward his world. But 
while this is true, it may also be that there are 
fundamental variations of the organisms of the 
people concerned; that temperament is partly 
a matter of the degree of perfection of working 
of the mechanism of the body. One may be per- 
sistently pessimistic because of slight chronic 
indigestion ; other persons may always be cheer- 
ful because of their perfectly abounding health. 
They have never known a sick day, they have 
never felt a pain, their bodies work flawlessly. 
Certain modern physiological and psychological 
investigations suggest that beyond such gross 
physical conditions there is a possibility that 
differences in temperament may depend upon 
some very obscure balancing of the secretions 
of the ductless glands of the body. This is sim- 
ply a possibility — perhaps a little more in the 
light of recent investigation. 

When it comes to determining just why a 
person is a certain kind of person rather than 



CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 173 

another kind, there is no set phrase that will 
answer the question. The matters of tempera- 
ment and of character which have been so briefly 
discussed are names given to somewhat definite 
attitudes, themselves made up, as has been said, 
of the various forms of response of which hu- 
manity is capable. But beyond all these, and 
somewhat different from them, there is another 
factor which we ordinarily name "will." In 
the discussion of will we again enter debatable 
ground. 

There are two groups of theories of will. In 
the first place there are those theories repre- 
sented by Pillsbury, 1 who tells us that will con- 
sists of the sum-total of the conditions of action 
or choice. Then, again, there are theories, ex- 
pressed by many religious and ethical teachers, 
to the effect that will is an entity which stands 
between the conditions which lead to action and 
the actions themselves. According to this sec- 
ond group the essential work of will is to render 
decisions and determine lines of action. It can 
easily be seen how completely distinct the 

i Pillsbury, W. B., "Fundamentals of Psychology," p. 526. 



174 YOUTH AND THE OPEN DOOR 

theories are, and on what different psychologies 
they are based. They both cannot be true. 

It is not possible to prove that one of these 
theories is true and the other false. The writer 's 
preference is toward the first of these two, bnt 
one can't fail to recognize that, from the stand- 
point of experience, there is much to be said in 
favor of the second theory. Perhaps all that 
is necessary to be said here is that efficient activ- 
ity is probably better produced by the second 
than by the first of these definitions, that it is 
more liable to produce persistence, strong effort, 
and, thereby, success, than the first. The first 
theory is physiological and not practical. The 
second is inspiring and dynamic. 

The student at college, or any young person 
attempting any serious task, who earnestly de- 
sires to achieve success in it, may be helped if 
he face the following question honestly. What 
is your aim in attending college, or in entering 
the business in which you are concerned, or in 
attempting the task which you have taken up? 
Your aim may best be expressed in terms of 
some model, or in terms of some definite goal. 
" There is some person I wish to be like," 



CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 175 

"There is some position I aspire to obtain." 
Such a statement of one's pnrpose must be 
remembered consistently and persistently. If 
the goal is kept continually in one's mind, it 
will affect one's activity and that in turn will 
affect one's character. Whatever you do, or 
whatever you desire to do, will become expressed 
in your character. A man's desires shape the 
man. The whole process is perfectly inevitable 
and irresistible. 



Deacidifed using the Bookkeeper pro* 
Neutralizing agent: Magnes,um Oxide 
Treatment Date: Oct. 2004 

PreservatsonTechnologi 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 

(724)779-2111 



